Windows of My Soul
by Alixtii
Summary: After examining new intelligence, two members of the reforming Council of Watchers come to a very alarming conclusion about a certain mad vampire. Epic in scope, with plenty of historical flashbacks! Fits in canon. R&R.
1. Previously on BtVS

**_The windows of my soul I throw_**  
**_Wide open to the sun._**  
John Greenleaf Whittier, _My Psalm_

* * *

**TITLE:** "Windows of My Soul" (see quote above)  
  
**AUTHOR:** Episkopos Reverend Alixtii O'Krul V of the Church of St. Jesu the Heretic, Discordian  
  
**RATING:** PG-13 (for sexual situations and language)  
  
**SUMMARY:** After examining new intelligence, two members of the reforming Council of Watchers come to a very alarming conclusion about a certain mad vampire.

**PAIRINGS:** Riley/Sam, Willow/Kennedy, and Buffy/Immortal. (Because that's where we are in canon). Implied B/A and B/S, with the emphasis on the latter, but since Buffy and Spike can't meet for continuity reasons, you're spared those 'ships if you can't stand them. S/D, of course, especially in flashbacks. F/S. Riley/OC. Lydia/OC.

**SPOILERS**: Pretty much all of _Buffy_ and _Angel_, with the possible exception of some of the events in the last few episodes of _Angel. _There may be spoilers for revelations found out in the series after this fic takes place (mid-season 5, see below), but no actually knowledge of the events of those episodes will be presented (except maybe by Drusilla).

**TIMELINE:** Chapters in the "present" (December 2003) take place after "Lineage," during the events of "Destiny," "Harm's Way," and "Damage." This means that at the beginning of the story, Wesley is on his leave of absence (in "Destiny," when in real life Alexis Denisof and Alyson Hannigan were busy having their honeymoon), that is obviously true. However, since "Destiny" aired in November and "Harm's Way" in January, there's a little problem figuring out the timing. In "Harm's Way," Fred asks Spike where he's been, saying it has been days (presumably since the events in "Destiny"). Since two months is a little more days than I think Fred could have meant, I'm going to have my story span both "Destiny" and "Harm's Way" and take place in the month of December (a compromise between November and January, see?). I might even throw some Christmas-y elements in

So let me make it clear in the following fashion: Spike is solid, Andrew is in L.A., and it's still only December 2003. However, as of Chapter 10, Lindsey has not appeared to Spike as Doyle yet (and so Spike doesn't have his apartment), which means that Andrew has only _just_ appeared in L.A.—possibly earlier than was implied in "Damage" and for reasons not immediately connected to the events of that episode. _Compendre_?  
  
Heck, even that makes more sense than having "Consequences/Just Rewards" taking place 19 days after "Chosen" and then "Life of the Party" be set during Hallowe'en.

**This is NOT an AU. **

While I have nothing against AU's per se, I do feel that an AU has to earn its AU-ness, and its chief focus should be to clarify aspects of the canon Buffyverse by putting them in contrast with a type of counterpoint. (Thesis plus Antithesis equals Synthesis, y'know. Just ask Hegel.) Nyxie's "Jewel Tones: Five Faiths That Never Were" is my idea of a good AU. I haven't posted an AU here yet, and when I do, I promise it'll be more than rampant wish- fulfillment. (Not to deny that there's a place for wish-fulfillment in fanfic. You'll find more than a little of it in this fic.) It's important for me to stay within canon unless I have a very, very good reason to stray.

(I won't even mention those AUs where the characters are in completely different situations—Elizabethan England, rock stars, or all human—but retain the names from Buffy. As far as I'm concerned, that's not Buffy. I don't understand why people write them, and I don't read them. Not that I would ever disrespect those who do choose to write and read them—I just don't claim to understand.)  
  
It's been very difficult to keep this story within canon. Halfway through writing this story, I found out Lydia—one of my main characters—_was_ in the exploding Watcher building. This was probably the biggest obstacle, but there are small ones too: figuring out the timing (see the nightmarish "Timeline" section above), keeping Buffy from finding out about Spike, etc. Faith and Lydia can know about Spike, because I seriously doubt we'll ever see anything in canon to convince us they didn't know. Similarly, I doubt canon will give us anything to contradict my claim in this story that Lydia survived the Watcher explosion—most likely, we'll just never see her again, which means my story could very well happen. If you're curious as to how and why Lydia survived, stay tuned: future flashbacks (is that an oxymoron?) will make some things clear while posing new questions. (It took me a while, but I did finally come up with a solution that made me happy. Of course, if I had known she was dead at the beginning, I would never have started, which would have been the easiest solution of all.)

**FEEDBACK:** Please. Medium of exchange and all that, y'know. Not afraid of bad reviews, so flame away. After all, at least then I know it is being read, even if not enjoyed.

**SHAMELESS PLUG: **For more of Caitlyn Love, see my "The Academy," which was started when a reviewer of this work asked me if she was a Slayer or not. Beth Daniels will probably turn up in my "Divine Interventions" which is connected to "That Old-Time Religion" and "Olympus." I recommend all of those stories, but please read (and review!) this one first. It's my baby—my epic—my one true love, as far as stories go.

**DISCLAIMER:** Same as always. I don't own these characters; Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy do. They're in better hands with him than with me anyway. Technically, Reginald, Solomon, Jezebel, Catelyn, the Romani woman, the priestesses, John Walsh, Franz the Nazi, and a handful of other characters are my creations, but they don't make much sense outside of Whedon's universe. He's welcome to them as long as he credits me in some way.  
  
**DEDICATED TO:** Juliet Landau and Cynthia LaMontagne, two guest stars whose characters made this story possible.

* * *

**Previously on _Angel_ and _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_**  
  
A playground and a predator. She makes her way through the playground, remembering the way her mother would play for her--before the woman's brutal murder.  
  
_She's called Drusilla, a sometime paramour of Spike's. She was killed by an angry mob in Prague._  
  
_Well, they don't make angry mobs like they used to, 'cause this girl's alive._

And the predator's predator, the Slayer, who watches as the predator approaches her prey.

_Run and catch..._

The predator and her paramour enter a factory. They face a small child, whose youthful face belies his power and his importance. The Annointed One.

"Me and Dru, we're moving in," Spike says.

_Run and catch..._

It is a hundred years earlier. Two predators watch their prey: three sisters, all in a row like the maidens from Mistress Mary Quite Contrary's nursery rhyme.  
  
"She has the Sight," the female says to the male.  
  
"Visions," the male answers, considering. "She sees the future. She is pure innocence."  
  
_I did a lot of unconscionable things when I became a vampire. Drusilla was the worst. She was... an obsession of mine. She was pure and sweet and chaste..._  
  
_And you made her a vampire._  
  
_First I made her insane. Killed everybody she loved. Visited every mental torture on her I could devise. She eventually fled to a convent, and on the day she took her holy orders, I turned her into a demon._  
  
"Black sky! It wants a little wormy me. No! No!"  
  
"What is she doing here?" Darla asks. "I thought you killed her."  
  
"No," says Angelus, "just her family."  
  
"Eyes like arrows...like needles!" the girl calls out. No one takes notice.  
  
"This one's special. I have big plans for her."  
  
"Snake in the woodshed! Snake in the woodshed!"

_The lamb is caught..._  
  
"He's with me," Buffy says. "He has a soul."  
  
"Oh, he's like Angel?"  
  
"No!" Spike spits out in indignation.  
  
"Sort of," Buffy admits.

"I am nothing like Angel."

"He fights on my side," Buffy says. It's clear that that is all that matters. "Which is more than I can say for some of us."

_You know, I started it. The whole having a soul. Before it was all the cool new thing._  
  
_Oh, my god, are you twelve?_

"Poor Spike," Drusilla says to him. "So lost. Even I can't help you now."  
  
_...in the blackb'ry patch._  
  
"Gotta move, lamb. I think it's fair to say, school's out for the bloody summer."  
  
"Spike."  
  
"I mean it. I got to do this."  
  
Their hands meet, flame erupting from them.

_Do you remember the song mummy used to sing me? Pretty.  
_  
"Sir, we are crippled," Lydia tells Travers.  
  
"It's all right, Lydia. We are still masters of our fate, still captains of our souls."

And then the Council building....explodes.

_I remember._

"You win," Lilah says. "We're moving out. The senior partners are ceding this territory to you, and to prove it, they want to give you controlling interest in our L.A. Office. You get the building, assets, personnel, letterhead, paper clips, all of it. It's yours to do with as you see fit."  
  
_Did you miss me, my pretty William?_  
  
"Spike?" Wesley asks.  
  
"Spike," confirms Angel.  
  
"Blondie bear?"

_(Special thanks to the Buffyverse Dialogue Database for the dialogue here, and used throughout the story.)_

* * *

**DRAMATIS PERSONAE, CASTED**  
(in order of appearance, up to Chapter 11)

Drusilla: Juliet Landau (BtVs Season 2, Recurring)  
Darla: Julie Benz (Recurring)  
Spike/William the Bloody: James Marsters (BtVS Seasons 2-7, AtS Season 5)  
Lydia Chalmers: Cynthia Lamontagne (BtVS "Checkpoint" & "Never Leave Me")  
Buffy Anne Summers: Sarah Michelle Gellar (BtVS Seasons 1-7)  
Dawn Summers: Michelle Trachtenberg (BtVS Seasons 5-7)  
Riley Finn: Marc Blucas (BtVS Seasons 4-5)  
Sam Finn: Ivana Milicevic (BtVS "As You Were")  
Faith: Eliza Dushku (BtVS Season 3, Recurring)  
Rupert Giles: Anthony S. Head (BtVS Seasons 1-7)  
Willow Rosenberg: Alyson Hannigan (BtVS Seasons 1-7)  
Kennedy: Iyari Limon (BtVS Season 7)  
Andrew Wells: Tom Lenk (BtVS Season 6-7, AtS Season 5)  
Amanda: Sarah M. Hagan (BtVS Season 7)  
Quentin Travers: Harris Yulin (Recurring)  
The First Evil: Harris Yulin  
Ethan Rayne: Robin Sachs (Recurring)  
Gwen Raiden: Alexa Devalos (AtS Season 4)  
Eve: Sarah Thompson (AtS Season 5)  
Lilah Morgan: Stephanie Romanov (AtS Seasons 1-4)  
Roger Wyndam-Pryce: Roy Doltrice (AtS "Lineage")  
Lindsey Macdonald: Christian Kane (Ats Season 1-2, 5)  
Wesley Wyndam-Pryce: Alexis Denisof (BtVS Season 3, AtS Seasons 1- 5)  
Krevlornswath of the Deathwok Clan: Andy Hallet (AtS Seasons 2-5)  
Angel/us: David Boreanaz (BtVS Seasons 1-3, AtS Seasons 1-5)

.**DRAMATIS PERSONAE, UNCASTED  
**(in order of appearance, up to Chapter 11)

Reginald Kilroy  
Jezebel  
Solomon  
Romani Woman  
Yr-a'k-tran Priestess  
Catelyn Love ("The Academy")  
Beth Daniels  
John Walsh  
Franz the Nazi  
Cassilda the Vampire Slayer  
Cassandra the Vampire Slayer  
Young Maggie Walsh


	2. Conversations about Vampires

_**Conversations about Vampires  
**_by Alixtii

* * *

"Okay, this is where I have a problem. See, because we're talking about vampires. We're having a _talk_ with vampires in it. "

--Xander, in "The Harvest"

* * *

**London, England – December 1903**  
  
"What shall we do without you, grandmother?"  
  
Spike watched as Darla bristled at Dru's use of "grandmother." "Whatever you want to," she said briskly. It was obvious to Spike that Darla really could not have cared less what would happen to Dru and him.  
  
"Must you go?"  
  
"My master has called me," she said. "I must answer. I hope you would show me so much respect."  
  
Right, thought Spike. He just happens to call you a few years after Angelus leaves himself—a subject which Darla still refused to talk about it. And it has nothing at all with being a convenient excuse to get rid of us.  
  
Drusilla's thoughts, however, seemed to be in a different place. "Of course, grandmother," she said. "You will call out to me, and I will save you, put you in the dirt and we will be together again."  
  
"Erm, yes, Drusilla," Darla said, clearly having no clue what Dru had just said. (Spike didn't have a sodding clue either, but then, she hadn't been talking to him now, had she?) "I have no doubt that you will do that. Keep Spike in line, Drusilla; never forget who is the sire and who is the chylde."  
  
"Oh, my Spike'll be good," Dru whispered to her grandsire conspiratorially. "He's my knight in blemished armor."  
  
"That's right, love," said Spike, choosing to take the comment as a compliment. "We'll get along."  
  
"Well, good luck with that," Darla said. "And who knows? We might meet again."  
  
"Goodbye, grandmother," Drusilla said with something close to actual sorrow. "The cloth of the Church does not become you. Angelus knows. Or else, he will"  
  
"The Church doesn't become me, you...." Darla trailed off, clearly trying to keep the parting civil. "Goodbye, Drusilla. Goodbye, William. Have fun."  
  
Spike put his arm around the waist of his lover and his sire. "We will," he said to Darla. "Don't worry about that, we will."

* * *

**London, England – December 2003**  
  
"Well, at least your subject is still on this plane of existence. And evil. How does that look for me? I write a long thesis, even impressed Travers, the poor late bastard. Incredibly dangerous, was the jist of it. Do not underestimate. And then what happens? He sacrifices his life to close the Hellmouth."

"Well, you were right about one thing; he wasn't to be underestimated. Lydia, what happened was extraordinary circumstances. It in no way reflects upon the quality of your research."

"I didn't even get his age right. But that's not even the point. If extraordinary circumstances can happen once, Reginald, they can happen again. Don't you understand? This is going to change everything about the way we work."

"Hmm. And I thought the First Evil blowing up the Council HQ did that."

"Don't jest, Reg, it's in bad taste. A vampire, choosing on its own accord to search out a soul, go through whatever trials necessary—"

"He was obsessed, Lydia. It doesn't change what he was: amoral, consciousless, a mindless predator."

"No, that's your subject. And even she, insane as she is, could feel love. Reginald, I've studied William the Bloody for over a decade. He's passionate, yes. But he's more than a predator." Lydia paused, smiled weakly. "But that's enough of that. My thesis is written, defended, accepted years ago. It might have blown up with the other half of the archives—the ones not stolen by Sirk or Giles, bless their thievish souls—for all the good it'll do us now."

Reginald nodded. "It's lucky I had already checked these out, or I would really be up the creek without a paddle, as the Americans would say."

"Have you had any success? Any idea where she might be?"

"Returned to Europe, certainly," he answered. "I have some sightings in the Czech Republic which might be her. And then there are the reports from Romania."

"Romania? Isn't that where Angelus was ensouled? What does she want?"

"There's a method to her madness, that much I am sure about that. But what?"

"Maybe she wants a soul, too."

"And then the entire Order of Aurelius will end up getting souls. Besides, what would she do with a soul? She's mad."

"Then she won't have to worry about going crazy when the guilt falls onto her. Hmm, what if we're looking at this the wrong way? Wax on, wax off. If someone can insert a soul, he can remove it as well."

Reginald looked at his lover in shock. "You think she is trying to de- ensoul Angelus?"

"It fits her M.O. It's worth looking into."

"It's worth more than that—if that's the case, we have to move fast. Where's the Slayer? In Spain?"

"Which slayer?" Lydia pointed out. "We only have a few hundred on our hands."

"You know the one I mean. The first one—the experienced one. The Summers girl."

"In Italy, I think. Rome, with her sister. Your best bet is Rupert Giles."

"You should call him, Lydia. You have more superiority than I do."

"Hmm, last time Rupert and I parted it wasn't exactly on the best of terms. But I'll do my best."

"Have him get in touch with the Summers girl, and see what he can do with the other slayers he has under his wing. The second Slayer in particular should know about this; she was able to bring down Angelus just last year."

"And then she'll have to deal with Dru too, no doubt. Hmm—Faith versus Drusilla. Two criminally insane, preternaturally strong brunettes locked in mortal combat. Sort of poetic, don't you think?"

"You might want try to get a call in to Wyndam-Pryce's son, too, at Wolfram and Hart, while you're at it. The more people aware of the situation, the better."

"Yet another person with whom parting was not a sweet sorrow." Lydia sighed. "You know, Reg, we'd better be right about this."

"Do you have any idea what'll happen if we _are_ right and don't do anything?"

Lydia sighed. "I know, I know. But here's hoping, nonetheless."

* * *

**Somewhere near Romania...**  
  
Solomon looked at Jezebel. "Why are we here, in this God-forsaken country?"

Jezebel shook her head. "Not God-forsaken. They know God too well, have stolen His secrets. Like her—too in tune with the darkness."

"She's a madwoman."

Jezebel shrugged. "True enough. But did you see what she did to Arthur? Wouldn't just stake him; made sure his death was slow and agonizing. I saw a vial of holy water in her purse, Solomon. I don't think it's for cauterizing wounds—especially since we don't bleed all that fast, lacking circulation and all.

"Besides, she's an Aurelian, and they're strong. She may be the eldest of her Order now, even, if you don't count Angelus. So I wouldn't suggest crossing her. She's our mistress and we're her minions."

Solomon nodded, resigned. "However did we get this gig? In the middle of Eastern Europe, the minions of a crazywoman...."

* * *

**London, England**  
  
"I managed to contact the Slayer. She and her sister are making their way to Romania as we speak, with all possible haste."

Reginald nodded, then paused. "Something's happened. What is it?"

"I also made a phone call to the Los Angeles branch of Wolfram and Hart, where's Wyndam-Pryce's son is working. As you suggested."

"Not the best way to warm up to father, working at an evil law firm. Did he say anything about returning the archives Sirk stole?"

Lydia shook his head. "No, he was on a leave of absence because he—get this—thought he shot his father."

Reginald looked at her in shock. "I knew the two didn't get along, but..."

"It gets better. Guess who's turned up at Wolfram and Hart?"

"A vampiric Perry Mason."

"None other than a newly resurrected William the Bloody."

"Human?"

"Still vampire. Although as I hear it, possibly in the running for the Shanshu."

"That's ridiculous, there's the whole part about the visions and..." He stopped. "Drusilla?"

"It's possible," confirmed Lydia. "I'm not sure what to think."

"Well, congratulations," said Reginald. "Your thesis isn't obsolete after all. Where did you get all this information?"

"From Angelus' secretary. A Ms. Harmony Kendall. She was quite talkative. Then she remembered she wasn't suppose to tell me and swore me to secrecy. Something about him going crazy if the Slayer ever found out."

"Harmony Kendall," Reginald repeated, the name uncertain on his tongue. "The name sounds familiar somehow."

"I thought so, too, so I ran the name through the Council's database. Turns out she's a vampire, speculated to be a member of the Order of Aurelius through an alternate line created by the Master right before the Slayer killed him."

"A vampire? As Angelus' secretary? And talkative? Don't tell me she has a soul too."

"Not insofar as I can tell. But you never know with these Aurelians."

"Well, Angelus won't have one for long if we don't get cracking—won't have a soul, I mean, not a secretary—unless Drusilla stakes the secretary, which I guess would always be possible. Did you get through to Cleveland?"

Lydia nodded. "They're on alert. They've sent one of their operatives, someone named Andrew, to feel out the situation without alerting Angelus or his staff. If Angelus loses his soul, Faith will be in town within hours, ready for anything."

"Good. We'll need her to be, no doubt."

* * *

**Somewhere in Romania....**  
  
The gypsy knew who the dark woman in front of her was. There was no doubt about it—she was Death. She and her two companions—a brunette man and a blonde woman, each as deadly as the other—had come into the village and slaughtered half of it before they had found the woman they were looking for.

"We were a family once, you know," the woman said. "Grandmother, Daddy, my William, and me. The stars sang and said we would be together forever. My William, he said we would be together forever. But then something happened, and made the stars lie. Do you know what it was?"

The gypsy woman knew, but did not speak.

"You were naughty and put that wicked soul within him. Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb's fled from the blackberry patch. Daddy had to leave. He tried to be evil, but his heart wasn't in it. Hearts are important things, you know. Daddy once gave me a heart, later, when he finally freed himself from the Angel-beast. But now the Angel-beast is back, and Miss Edith is very angry.

"Do you like my story? It is a sad story, you know. Never was there a tale of more woe than this of Drusilla and her fine beau. Grandmummy left to go to her Master, that dreadful creature with the bloody mouth. We couldn't invite him to tea, not looking like that we couldn't. What would people think?"

Through all of this, the gypsy sat very still, not moving. Drusilla went on.

"It was just William and me, then. No Daddy, no Grandmum, but we had each other. We were in love. Have you ever loved anyone? You have, I can smell it. Was he very handsome? My William is very handsome, you know. Grandmum could never see it, but Daddy knew. And I knew, of course, because the stars whispered it to me.

"We had a wonderful time. We danced through Europe, a slow waltz. The children screamed out of key. They had to be punished. My William and I came up with the most exquisite punishments. Do you want me to show you?"

The old woman, already pressed against the wall, did all she could do to flatten herself even further.

"And then came her. The Slayer. The she-devil. Or we came to her, after Prague. The stars were cross with me then. They are a horrible thing, Slayers are: an infection, a plague. You kill one, another one comes up. Like avocadoes, or peppermints. My William killed two Slayers, he did. But it wasn't good enough. You know how they taste? Like ashes. William let me taste once, before we made love over the girl's body. When I killed a Slayer, I didn't even drink: I looked in her eyes and slit her throat, like a mother with a little lost lamb.

"He tasted like her, like ashes. Ashes and dust. He was covered in her, all I could see was her devil's face. He went back to her, you know, which is when the men found him and put the metal in his head. Metal, keeping him from being what he was. A cage."

The vampire's voice grew wistful. "We had a cage once. In London. We would keep a girl in it and listen to her scream. Even Angelus admitted the music was beautiful. But cages are not for my William. Do you know what happens when you put a wild animal in a cage? It becomes tame—until even I could not help him anymore. He went himself and got one of those filthy souls, and it burned him up. The river showed it to me, in my dreams.

"And now he's back. Do you know where he is? With Daddy. They are a family again, fighting and scratching just like in old times. They all got souls: even Grandmummy had a soul growing inside her. But they were a family. I want to have a family. I want to be with them, even if Daddy still won't hurt me. Even if I can't be naughty. Even if I need a dirty soul.

"You can give me a soul."

It was at that moment that a crossbow bolt flew through the air and pierced her chest.

* * *

**A/N: **My previous author notes at this point asked "Is Drusilla dusted? Chances I'll end up writing more of this, but this seems a logical spot to end for now." Now, all you need to do is go to the next chapter which--not to spoil the suspense for anyone reading this for the first time--sorta implies the outcome.

I decided to collapse several scenes together in order to make longer chapters. I've beem thinking in "pentads" as I write this anyway--a flashback, followed by a "December 2003" scene in the same location (or Los Angeles if the flashback is in Sunnydale) and then three more scenes all set in December 2003. I hope you like the new format, as it allows me to come up with titles for the chapters and start each new chapter with a quote, as above.

Alixtii.


	3. Hiding Places

**_Hiding Places  
_**by Alixtii

* * *

"Xander, don't speak Latin in front of the books."

--Giles, in "Superstar"

* * *

**Somewhere in Africa – June 1917**  
  
"Is there anything else you would like, sir?" the girl asked them. 

_Yes_, thought Spike as he looked at the smooth figure of their young hostess. _I'd like you to sink my fangs into your neck_. But the demon Yr-a'k-tr probably wouldn't take very well to Spike's draining one of his priestesses—demons tended to be possessive about those sort of things. They were lucky that they had been welcomed as guests to stay in his temple.

Drusilla, however, was not reticent to name what she wanted. "Blood," she said. "Spike and I thirst, thirst for our special sort of nourishment, life to sustain in death. And Miss Edith wants cake."

The priestess nodded and brought her hands to her neck, untied the strings which held her white robe together and let it slip off her body. "Blood I can handle," she said.

Spike cocked an eyebrow and smiled. That was his Dru, unafraid to ask for—or take—what she wanted.

* * *

**Somewhere in Africa – December 2003**  
  
They weren't zombies—not quite. They were stronger than normal zombies, faster too, and more agile. They were all women, and they were all dressed in the same white dresses. 

They were more lethal than normal zombies. Sam Finn sliced her broad sword through one of the uber-zombie women's necks; the head fell to the ground, still hissing. She parried the attacks of two zombies which came at her, then thrust her sword into one zombie as she spun around it, positioning it so that it was between her and the other zombie. The zombie, still on her sword, reached up and grabbed her face, its claw-like fingernails ripping into the skin of her cheek. Sam ignored it and thrust the sword into the second zombie, so that both were on her sword like shish- kebob.

"Catelyn!" Sam cried as she took one hand off her sword to knock the clearer zombie's arm away from her face. "I could use some fire here."

Catelyn, a petite blonde holding a flamethrower, nodded and pivoted slightly. "Anytime, Sam!" she said.

Sam raised her leg and sent a powerful kick into the close zombie even as she pulled her sword out of its chest. The two zombies fell backwards into the flames, incinerating. Sam turned to see the third member of the group—her husband—hacking away at two more of the zombie women.

"Need any help, Riley?" Catelyn asked.

"Nah," he answered, "I can't let you girls have all the fun." One of the zombies came at him; he threw it over his shoulder towards the two women. As it rose from the ground, Sam delivered a quick roundhouse kick, sending it back to the floor just as Catelyn flamed it. When they turned back towards Riley, the other zombie was nothing more than pieces on the floor.

"What were those things?" asked Sam.

"Priestesses," answered Catelyn, as she surveyed the strange pictograms on the walls. "Acolytes of the demon Yr-a'k-tr. They took their own lives as a sacrifice to the demon and then were reanimated by his power."

"So where is this demon and how do we kill it?"

"We can't," answered Catelyn. "At least not physically. It doesn't exist in time. What we can do is shut down his ability to interfere in our dimension by cutting off his access to this world. The conduit should be somewhere in this temple, but we won't be able to know what it is or how it works until I finish decoding these pictograms."

"In the meantime, we'll set up camp," said Riley.

"Good idea," responded Catelyn as she gazed intently at the wall.

Sam sighed. She wasn't thrilled with having Catelyn as a "third wheel" on this mission, especially when the young blonde looked so much like Riley's ex-lover. But Catelynn, despite being right out of high school, was an expert demonologist (it had been a private school in Cleveland run by an order of Catholic priests skilled in the occult), and there was no one better to have at one's side in the fight. Sam liked the girl; she just didn't trust her around her husband.

* * *

**London, England**  
  
Reg pushed his tongue farther into Lydia's mouth, tasting its unique flavour. He ran his hair through his lover's hair, let his fingers find there way to her blouse....

He paused.

"What's wrong?" asked Lydia, clearly displeased at the interruption.

"What if Wyndam-Pryce finds out about us?"

"Then he is going to have some explaining to do as to why he is prying into my sex life, Reg."

"The man's a suspicious bastard. I have no doubt he won't let a little thing like privacy or common decency stop him from doing whatever he feels is necessary to protect the council. Besides, you're my thesis advisor."

"Roger Wyndam-Pryce is not God, and he _certainly_ is not Quentin Travers. He is not the end-all and be-all of the Council. If it comes down to a confrontation, he knows he needs me. If you are what I demand, he'll let me have you."

"And everyone will know that the only reason I'm in the Council is because my lover was on my defense board and played hard ball? What does that say about me?"

"Reg, your thesis is bloody brilliant—what you've finished of it, anyway. No one is going to doubt your ability."

Reg sighed, then brought himself back down upon her, kissed the side of her neck. "You sure?" heasked, whispering the question into her ear.

"Reg, there is no need for anyone to ever find out. Wyndam-Pryce knows we're working the Drusilla-in-Romania case together."

He nodded, admitting the truth of what she said. Still, something kept giving him the feeling that they were just waiting for the next shoe to drop, and whatever it was, it wasn't going to be good.

* * *

**Somewhere in Romania...**  
  
Drusilla pulled the crossbow bolt out of her chest and raised her eyes to see where it had come from. Grrr, she thought as she saw Solomon and Jezebel sparring with the Slayer. She hoped they liked being dust. Drusilla didn't like dust; Angelus had taught her to bathe everyday even though her mother had told her never to take a bath; he preferred her white skin to be unblemished. Sometimes he himself would bathe her; sometimes he would bathe her in blood. 

But the Slayer was fighting the two vampires hand by hand; there was no crossbow near her. Drusilla turned her gaze, searching for the crossbow. There it was, held by the pretty blur of energy. The Key. Drusilla could see through the guise the Key wore, that of a beautifully appetizing adolescent girl, to the destructive energy that was beneath it, ready to burst out of its fleshy prison and open all the doors to other worlds, worlds without shrimp and worse. _Much, much worse._

"Damn," muttered Drusilla. "Miss Muffet nor her big sister were invited to play. Now we must do this in a different way." She grabbed the gypsy woman by the hair and, with her vampire strength, lifted her right off the ground, ignoring the old woman's cries of pain. No, not ignoring—taking pleasure in them. But there was no time for such delights, not when the purplish energy was firing her crossbow. There was too much chance that the Key might actually hit her heart. "We'll have to play somewhere else," Drusilla hissed, as she drug the gypsey woman along.

Wait. She needed something—the stars were trying to tell her. She stopped and concentrated. _Thesula_, the stars said. The crystal sphere in front of Drusilla—it was like the world, only smaller and clearer and without the frogs. She would need it. She grabbed it with her free hand and rushed away. Behind her she could hear Jezebel turning to dust. It wouldn't be long before Solomon joined her, and the wind would blow their ashes around and they would be together for ever and ever. It would be romantic if the two had been able to tolerate each each other.

Drusilla scurried along, the Orb of Thesula in one hand and the gypsy woman in the other. She needed to escape the Slayer and her Key of a sister, escape to a place where they would be safe and could have tea, where the sun would not rise and turn her to dust like the Slayer turned Solomon and Jezebel to dust, like children turn to dust when one leaves them in the ground too long.

A forest loomed in front of her. A wilderness, where she could spend 40 days like the Christ whose cross burned her skin. (She had learned all about the Christ, in a different life so long ago. Her mother had told her that when she died she would join the Christ in heaven. Well, she was dead, and what did the Christ do but mock her from His cross she could not touch?) She could stay alive on the gypsy woman, if she had to, the old woman and all of the creatures of the forest, the wolf and the ram and the hart, and the lion and the tiger and the bear. .

For a moment, she heard her Spike's voice in her head: _You're in Romania, ducks, not the jungle. There aren't any lions and tigers._ That's what her Spike would say. She would have her Spike back, have him back very soon. But there were creatures in the forest that no one knew about, except those who knew the darkest secrets of the Old Country, or those who, like Drusilla, had the stars to whisper those secrets to them. There was power in the forest, power that the Romanian people rightly feared.

The Slayer would learn to fear that power.

* * *

**Somewhere in Africa...**  
  
In the center of the temple sanctuary, on the marble floor, Sam had a small but considerable fire going. There wasn't much wood in the temple, but Riley had found a few cabinets which had no doubt been used as wardrobes by the priestesses when they had been alive. The pot of water was boiling, and Sam poured some into her bowl with the ration gruel. It wasn't the taste that she hated most about the stuff, although God knew that was bad enough. It was the texture. 

"How's the translating coming?" Riley asked Catelyn.

"Slow but sure," answered Catelyn from beyond the colonnade. "I think the priestesses were intended to circumambulate through the colonnade as they slowly built to an orgiastic frenzy. These pictographs are getting rather pornographic. The thing is, there's usually a second thread of text interlaced within the primary thread in most hijr languages. I'm trying to figure out what the second thread is—I think it may be some type of prophetic message."

Sam watched as her husband's ears perked up at the first mention of orgies. "Orgies?" he asked. "With just the priestesses?"

"There's been a few pictograms with animals in them, but I haven't seen any with men in them yet. Sam, you're married to a lecher."

"You bet I am," Sam joked, but her heart wasn't exactly in it.

"As far as I can tell," Catelyn continued, "one of the priestesses becomes possessed by Yr-a'k-tr, and through her the demon would, erm, 'take advantage of' his acolytes. Evidently Yr-a'k-tr enjoyed having a cult of priestesses who were devoted body and soul to his service. Until they killed themselves and became zombies, of course."

Sam knew that she had better take control of where the conversation was going quickly. "You said the second thread was a prophecy. Do you have any idea what it says?"

"I'm working on it," said Catelyn. "It's about a demon, a flesh- eater—no, wait, a blood-drinker."

"A vampire?" asked Riley.

"I think so. Yes—here's the mark of the Order of Aurelius. Only this doesn't make sense."

"What is it?" asked Sam.

"This is the pictogram for a human soul. Only vampires don't have souls."

"Don't worry," said Riley, "there's one that does." Sam recognized the grim look on Riley's face; she knew that he wasn't overly fond of his ex-lover's ex-lover, Angel. Of course, their latest intelligence communiqué had placed the ensouled vampire running a demonic law firm in L.A., which made no sense to Sam at all. But she was much better at killing vampires; Riley and Catelyn were better at understanding how they thought.

"But the pattern doesn't appear just once," said Catelyn from behind the colonnade. "It appears twice, each time with a different distinguishing mark."

"You're telling me there are two vampires with a soul?" asked Riley.

"Yes, and both Aurelians. If I'm reading these markings right, they're both in the same bloodline descended from the Master."

Sam saw Riley's jaw clench. Did he have an idea who the second ensouled vampire could be?

"Wait, a moment, here's the pattern again, with a third marker."

"Three ensouled Aurelians?" asked Sam. "Now we're just getting silly."

"And then—" Catelyn broke off.

"What is it, Cate?" Riley asked.

Catelyn hesitated before answering. "There's the pictogram for fire," she said, "followed by darkness. And then, if I'm translating this right, 'There will be a time of chaos, and from the chaos there will rise a—"

"Well, there will rise a what?" asked Sam.

"It doesn't say," answered Catelyn. "The prophecy cuts off there. All that's left is a rather large and impressive orgy pictogram."

* * *

**A/N: **If you're interested in Catelyn or the Catholic school she attended, you might want to check out my story "The Academy," which was started when one of my reviewers asked me if Catelyn was a Slayer. Oh, and let me reiterate that with the exception of the plot, Catelyn, and a couple tertiary characters, all of this is owned by Joss. 

Alixtii.


	4. Ready, Get Set

**_Ready, Get Set...  
_**by Alixtii

**

* * *

**

"You're right. We don't know how to fight it. We don't know when it'll come. We can't run, can't hide, can't pretend it's not the end, 'cause it is. [. . .] I'm standing on the Mouth of Hell, and it is gonna swallow me whole. And it'll choke on me. We're not ready? _They're_ not ready."

—Buffy, in "Bring on the Night"

* * *

**Sunnydale, California—January 2001  
  
**"But we understand that you help the Slayer," Lydia probed as her colleagues protected her with cross and crossbow. 

The vampire shrugged. "I pitch in when she pays me," he admitted.

"She pays you?" she asked, hurriedly writing notes down on her clipboard. "She gives you money?"

"Money, a little nip of blood out of some stray victim, whatever."

"Blood?"

"Well, if they're gonna die anyway." He paused, feining consideration. "Come to think of it, though, that's a bit scandalous, isn't it? Personally, I'm shocked. The girl's slipping."

_Testimony highly unreliable_, Lydia noted. "You've noticed a decline in her work?"

"Oh, yeah," the vampire said. "See, the poor little twig can't keep a man. Gets her all down. Few more disappointments, she'll be cryin' on my shoulder, mark my words."  
__

_Intriguing._ "Is that what you want?" Lydia asked, probing. "I'd think you'd want to kill her. You've killed Slayers before."

"Heard of me, have you?" Interested, he stepped closer.

"I wrote my thesis on you," Lydia admitted.

The vampire smiled. "Well, well," he said. "Isn't that neat." He stopped smiling "Tell me, pet, now we're such good friends, how's the Slayer doing? Is she okay? High marks in all categories?"

Lydia considered. The vampire's interest in the Slayer was unique, practically pathological for a vampire. _Deviant for a deviant_, Lydia mused. Did that make him normal, or even more eccentric? The latter no doubt, and what she wanted right now was to sit down with her favourite vampire psychology textbook and integrate these new findings with the research she had put forth in her thesis. But they were here to evaluate the Slayer, not the vampire.

Evaluate? Evaluate what? Not for the first time, Lydia wondered at the pointlessness of the entire review. What were they supposed to do if they didn't find her up to par? Let the world burn in an apocalypse because the Slayer didn't have the information she needed? Find someone else? Bust the mad slayer out of prison (or kill her and wait for a new Slayer to appear)? None of the options were viable—they were stuck with the Slayer they had, little as Travers might like it. What was Quentin trying to accomplish, anyway?

Lydia forced a smile and answered the vampire, "That information will not be made public until after the review is completed. Have a nice day, sir."

Did she just call a vampire "sir"? And wish him a good day? She wasn't sure if she should be embarrassed by her show of respect for the vampire (he was just a creature, after all, albeit an intriguing one and a fascinating object of study) or her terrible lack of tact. _Good day, indeed—when the very sun could fry him to cinders._ "Good day" was practically an oxymoron for a vampire. Unless you assumed that good things were disagreeable to vampires as a matter of course, being evil (_or, in many cases, merely amoral,_ her scholar's mind reminded her) and all.

* * *

**Los Angeles, California—December 2003  
  
**Spike was a simple man. He would divest all of himself into a few select passions, let them consume him to such a degree that he was aflame with them, they burned away at him until there was nothing left inside him. In life, those passions had been his mother, his poetry, and Cecily. In death, they had been Drusilla, the bloodlust, and the hunt. Then Drusilla left him and he had been chipped and suddenly the flame was gone, and he was an empty shell of a man—_no, not even a man_—of a vampire. 

And then he fell in love with Buffy Summers, the Vampire Slayer herself, and the flame came back, changed him as it burned away the old Spike until it quite literally consumed him in the Hellmouth beneath Sunnydale, leaving nothing behind but an empty crater.

And now?

At times, he reminded himself of those years when he had first been chipped, trying to still be evil and failing miserably. A failure, an empty shell with no purpose or worth. It was even appropriate that for so many weeks he had been nothing more than a spectre, just the form of William the Bloody without any of the substance. And other times, he looked at those around him at Wolfram & Hart, like Winifred Burkle, and how they were consumed by their own flame, helping the helpless by working for the evil law firm. They were misled, he was sure (he remembered his own dealings with the firm back in the 60's), but they had a purpose. And sometimes, he felt it was a flame he could let consume him, and be his purpose. It was a noble goal, and one he could be proud to work for.

If only it didn't mean working for the Poofter.

* * *

**Somewhere in Romania....  
  
**Drusilla is a creature of death, and so all but the strongest of the creatures of the forest fear her and avoid her. They sense what she is through pure instinct, just as a pomegranate needs nothing but instinct to fall from its tree. The larger animals, they desire her flesh, the potency of her blood; they wish to tear the cold flesh from her body until they sever her neck and she turns to dust in their mouths. They recognize what she is, and hunger for her power as only creatures of this forest would know to do. 

Drusilla does not fear them, of course; she _is_ a creature of death, and she brings death to them oh-so-quickly, using her claw-like nails to slice through one, then the next. Soon the pack of wolves lies dead at her feet, and she picks them up, one by one, and begins to feed off them until she is full. So much wolf-blood, much more than she could ever need, so she uses her fingernail to cut open her wrist, and the lets the blood fall into the mouth of the dying wolf. She drinks some more, then turns another.  
What will happen to them? Can animals become vampires? Even the stars do not know; it has never happened before. But they watch intently, through the dense trees which shield Drusilla from the sun, eager to find out.

She does not bury them. They are animals, unbaptized, and in no need of funeral. But she waits with the stars, to see if they rise with the moon.

* * *

**Cleveland, Ohio  
  
**Kick, kick, punch, block, kick, block, kick, punch. It wasn't a bad way to blow off steam. 

_Beeeeep, beeeeep, BEEP-BEEP. Beeeeep, beeeep, BEEP-BEEP-BEEP._

Oh, great. She couldn't imagine worse timing. She jumped into the air and sent a flying kick with each leg, each of her feet connecting with a different vampire's jaw. The two creatures of the night went flying back into the ally; as they pulled themselves to their feet, the Slayer whipped out her cell phone, checked who it was, hit the "talk" button, and lodged it between her shoulder and her chin.

"What is it, G'?" she asked, as she blocked a couple of vampire attacks and delivered a blow to one's upper chest. "I'm sorta busy right now."

"I'm sorry, Faith," Giles answered. "But I've just received a disturbing call from the Council."

"Oh?" Faith asked as she grabbed the heads of both vampires and slammed them into each other. "What do the bastards want?"

"You are aware of Drusilla, I presume?"

"Spike's sire?" asked Faith. "I never met the chick, but I hear she's bonkers. Causing problems?"

"Erm, yes. Possibly. She has been detected in Romania. Some members of the Council fear she may be trying to de-ensoul Angel."

Faith sighed. "Just what we need, Angelus back on the warpath. But between B' and me, we should be able to get him under control. Does Willow know?" She pulled the wooden stake out of her belt and plunged it into the vampire's heart.

"She and Kennedy are beginning to make preparations as the Council attempts to procure an orb of Thesula—Willow's old one was destroyed with Sunnydale—and ship it to her. Hopefully, however, it won't come to that: Buffy and Dawn are traveling to Romania as we speak. What we need you to is go to Los Angeles and stay there, just in case Drusilla succeeds. I've already sent Andrew to Wolfram and Hart; I'd prefer you to stay in the shadows, out of Angel's radar."

Faith looked at the second vampire she had been sparring with, looked her in the eyes as they exchanged blows. "That's fine with me, G'," she said. "I'm right at home in the shadows."

* * *

**Somewhere in Romania....  
**  
"We'll never find her in here," Dawn Summers complained. "There's too much forest, and just the two of us, and there might as well only be one of us, because it's too dangerous for us to split up." 

The elder Summers sighed. "What do you want me to do, Dawn? Say 'Oh well, Drusilla's gone into the forest, guess I'll let her go and de-soul Angel'?"

"No," said Dawn. "But there has to be a better method than this."

"Look," said Buffy. "I know this isn't how you wanted to spend your Christmas break. But I'd rather be back in Rome right now too. If Angel goes evil, we'll all be inconvenienced."

Dawn didn't see why she should suffer just because her sister's ex- boyfriend had a tendency to go evil. But she didn't say anything; she knew it wouldn't help and that, in the end, her sister was right: no one wanted Angelus on the loose. Dawn thought back to those days six years ago (she knew she really didn't exist six years ago, but damn it, she had the memories) when Angelus was on the loose, terrorizing both Buffy and her friends. Mom hadn't found out about Buffy's slayer-ness yet due to her massive refusal to see reality in the way typical of Sunnydale residents, but Dawn had been able to put two and two together (and get five) enough to be scared out of her wits. It wasn't a situation she wanted to relive.

She looked up at the sky. The foliage was so thick that hardly any sun managed to reach the forest floor, which meant that Drusilla would have pretty much free reign 24/7. Not a good thing.

Unlike most of the other major villains Buffy had faced, Dawn didn't have any real memories of Drusilla. She caught a glance of the vamp once when Xander cast that spell to have everyone fall in love with him (Dawn had already had a crush on him then, so it didn't affect her all that much, luckily), but she hadn't known the girl was a vampire then, so she hadn't bothered to get a good look. _What would it be like to be a vampire?_ Dawn wondered, not for the first time. _What would it be like to be crazy?_ (She knew the answer to that one—she only had to look at Buffy or maybe Andrew.) _What would it be like to be crazy_ and _a vampire?_ She couldn't imagine, which was a good thing, she decided, because she wasn't sure she really wanted to be able to.


	5. Party Favours

* * *

_**Party Favours  
**_by Alixtii

* * *

"It's a ritual sacrifice, with pie."

—Anya, in "Pangs"

* * *

.**Somewhere in Africa—June 1917  
  
**"It is time for you to meet our master," the priestess informed them. 

"Oh, good!" exclaimed Dru. "A party."

Spike and Dru followed her as she led them to the center of the temple, a large domed building. All of the priestesses were assembled, young girls in their white robe. Spike didn't think even one of them was older than 26. (_So what happens to them when they get that age?_ he wondered mildly.) His bloodlust was back in full swing: _just look at all those warm necks_.

"We gather to give ourselves up to the Master," announced the high priestess. "Nothing must come between us and him." And with that, each of the priestesses untied her robe and let it slip off her body. The entire assemblage stood there naked.

Dru looked at Spike smiled. He smiled back, wondering what she was thinking. She had an inventive imagination, and the lust for blood knew no gender. Well, mostly.

The priestesses began to circumambulate the room, partially hidden by the impressive colonnade. They began to chant in a demonic language Spike did not recognize. (Aside from English, Fyarl, French, some Latin, and the family of Yzarku languages, Spike was a relatively poor linguist, after all.)

"Do you know what they are saying, love?" Sometimes Dru's psi powers could make a relatively useful translation tool, if he could then translate her translation.

"They all calling out to their master, Spike. Giving themselves up to him and calling for him to fill them. Their minds, their bodies, their souls, all his to do with as he likes."

"He's got a sweet deal here," Spike acknowledged as he watched as the naked priestesses' chant grew more and more emphatic. Then, suddenly, one priestess suddenly spasmed, and for a moment Spike thought she was going to go into an epileptic fit. Then, suddenly, lightning ripped through her body, her golden tresses turned a jet black, and her green eyes lit up with a red fire.

"Oh, goody," said Drusilla. "Our demon friend has come to play." Strong gale-force winds blew within the domed room, no doubt there as a side-effect of the demon's summoning. "Such lovely colors," Dru added.

Presumably she could see the interdimensional nexus which had opened.

"_I am here_," announced Yr-a'k-tr. The voice which resounded from the priestess' mouth was deeper than Spike assumed her normal voice was, and it echoed. Yr-a'k-tr looked down appreciatively at the naked body of his conduit, and a grin appeared on the priestess' face, as he slid his hands (her hands?) over the curves of her (his) body. "_Worship me, my priestesses, my children, my slaves_."

The priestesses responded in the demonic language, but Spike didn't need Drusilla to tell him that they were worshipping the demon. "_You_," Yr- a'k-tr said, pointing to a young girl of about eighteen. "_What is your name, priestess_?"

"Courtney," she answered.

"_Are you prepared to worship me, Courtney?_"

"Yes, m-master," Courtney stuttered.

_"Your body, your mind, your soul, all of these you surrender to me?"_

"Y-yes."

Yr-a't-kr smiled. "_Good_." He traced the contours of her chin with his finger, then thrust his hand onto her breast. Suddenly a nexus of energy appeared around his hand, sucking the life out of Courtney.

"Wow," said Spike. "That must be a rush."

His comment must have attracted the demon's attention, because Yr-a't- kr suddenly seemed to notice his and Drusilla's presence. "_Vampire_," he said, and took a step towards the pair. Spike moved slightly, putting himself between the possessed priestess and Drusilla.

"We appreciate your hospitality," Spike said. He was never good at sucking up to powerful demons, but he knew that it was important to try.

"_You haven't seen anything yet,"_ the demon said, a smile on the his vessel's face, as he slid a hand down the side of a nearby priestess. _"You're mate is . . . lovely. Perhaps you would like to join in . . . the festivities?"_

"Ooh," cooed Drusilla. "A trade."

"Now, wait, Mr. high-and-mighty demon," Spike interjected. "None of that energy-sucking stuff."

_"Of course not. The traditional method will be much more enjoyable. Come on, vampire, look at my priestesses. I know you desire them. Join in with us."_

"Come on, love," said Drusilla. "All's fair once the socks come off."

Spike eyed up the tasty tidbits of priestesses. "Very well, love," he said. "As long as you're game."

And the orgy continued.

* * *

**Somewhere in Africa—December 2003  
  
**"I've gone over the pictograms over and over again," announced Catelyn. "And I keep coming to the same conclusion: if we are going to close the conduit, we are going to have to get it to manifest first."

"You mean, summon the demon?" asked Riley.

Catelyn nodded. "We have to let it posess one of us."

"You have to be kidding," said Sam. "It's too dangerous."

"I wish I was, Sam. But it's the only way if we are to close the conduit. One of us is going to have to let it take us over—you or me, Sam, because it has to be a female. We'll have to strip off our clothes, to make sure that nothing will interfere with the summoning—"

"I'll do it," Sam volunteered. There was no way she was letting Catelyn take her clothes off in front of her husband.

Catelyn looked at her quizzically, as if she was wondering how Sam could worry about a little thing like nudity when they had a temporally- transcendent demon to deal with. All she did was nod, however. "It'll be best if I have my faculties free, to deal with the demon once he is summoned."

Sam ignored the insinuation of her expediency, and stepped into the center of the dome. "What do I have to do?" she asked.

"Take off your clothes," said Catelyn, "and then read this." She handed Sam a piece of paper with a few lines of unintelligible gibberish on it, with translations to the right. "Pronounce it like it's German."

Sam nodded and stripped out of her jumpsuit, unclasped her bra and threw it to the temple floor, then stepped out of her underpants. "Good show, Sam," said Riley, a smile on his face. She glowered at him.

"_A'k- trala kar_," she read. _My body is yours._

_"A'k-trala syn." My mind is yours. _

_"A'k-trala thyk." My soul is yours. _

_"Halors tylor fim." Empty me, master. _

_"Synthyk a'k-trala kar." Fill me with your glory. _

_"A'k-tral or." My self is yours._

As she read the words, Sam used a meditation technique she had learned in Mongolia to cleanse her mind of all thought, focusing only on two things: the sounds of the words as she spoke them, and her own navel. As she repeated the chant, she could feel herself slowly pulling herself out of her own body; after all, what was it but a shell, a construct of bone and flesh to house her consciousness. And, at last, she was completely cut off from the mindless skin which still stood there, chanting mechanically and staring at its abdomen, and Yr-a'k-tr took over.

* * *

**Somewhere in Romania...  
  
**"Buffy, you need to get some sleep. It's been almost three days now."

Buffy shook her head. "I can't afford to," she said. "I need to protect you."

"You won't be able to protect anyone if you fall asleep in the middle of a fight. I'll have the crossbow, and the stake, and the machete, and the fire if need be. And I promise to wake you the moment something happens....if something happens. Which it won't. Cross my heart and hope to die." She crossed her heart, but refrained from the hoping to die part. That was her sister's territory.

Buffy looked at her. _She's going to give in,_ Dawn realized with relief. _She really does look terrible. Super Slayer stamina can only go so far._

"Okay," Buffy said, at last. "Let's set up camp."

It took them about an hour for them to get a nice fire going, then Buffy rolled out her bedroll and was asleep within minutes. Dawn held onto her machete, alert to every movement in the forest, just waiting for the mad vampire or some other danger to appear.

* * *

**Los Angeles, California  
  
**The parking garage was dark, but secluded. "We should be able to talk freely now," Andrew said.

"Should?" asked Faith. "I don't like the sound of that."

Andrew opened his hand to reveal a small red orb resting in his palm. "_Silentio_," he said, and it glowed, then disappeared. "That's just in case Wolfram and Hart's eyes and ears extend even further than we think." The Watcher-in-Training strode over to the balcony of the parking garage, looked up at the towering law firm. "Look at it," he said. "A bastion of evil in a sea of vulnerability."

_Bastion? Where did he come up with stuff?_ "Look," said Faith. "Angel isn't evil. Whatever he is doing, I am sure he is doing it for a good reason. I have no clue what that good reason could possibly be, but that's why he is doing what he is doing. I think."

"Ah, yes," said Andrew in his voice of mock-wisdom—probably a bad Obi- Wan Kenobi impression or something. "I had forgotten you had a connexion with Angel. The rogue Slayer and the vampire with a soul, both searching for redemption in a world that—"

Faith sighed. "Give it up, Wells, before I break you in half."

That shut up Andrew. _Sometimes a bad girl reputation is useful,_ Faith mused.

"There is one thing I need to tell you," hazarded Andrew guardedly, ready to stop at the first sign of Faith turning him to pieces. "But you have to promise not to let Buffy know."

* * *

**Somewhere in Romania...**  
  
Dawn stood next to her sleeping sister, a torch in one hand and a crossbow in the other, vigilant. Drusilla could strike at any moment, after all.

_What was that?_ Dawn heard something move, in a bush. She raised her torch and tried to make out if she could see what it was. Then she heard another noise, behind her, and she gave only a quick glance behind to see if she could see what it was. When she looked back, however, Drusilla stood in front of her, surrounded by a pack of wolves.

Dawn was about to cry out when Drusilla clamped a hand over her mouth, her nails digging into the girls' cheeks, drawing blood. "Hush, little baby," whispered the vampire. "Mummy's going to buy you a mockingbird."


	6. Demons and Lovers

**_Demons and Lovers  
_**by Alixtii

* * *

"We can love quite well. If not wisely."

—Drusilla, in "Crush"

* * *

**Sunnydale, California—September 1997  
  
**"A soul! Do you believe that, Dru? A sodding soul!" Offing the Annointed One had put Spike in a fairly good mood, but after a few hours that had run out.

"A soul," agreed Drusilla. "A soul, a spirit, the essence of what he once was and had left behind, now come back to haunt him. Pixies which whisper lies in his head, that he is a bad boy and should resist the hunger, that he should no longer be that which he is—a hunter, an artist, our Daddy. A dirty, filthy soul."

"You knew about this?"

"Yeahh." She draws the word out as if she is in love with the sound of her own voice.

"Well, why didn't I get the bloody memo? When did this happen?" _It couldn't be true, could it?_ Angel had taught him to hunt, to—he had been the epitome of evil. The monster with the face of an angel. _And now...?_

"In Romania," Drusilla answered. "It was the gypsies. They wanted vengeance, for it to burn in him like a hot poker against the flesh, sweet pain that would make the flowers cry out with envy. Punishment, for eternity. They cry out with anger, all of them, living for vengeance as we live for blood, all except for the one girl who tutors the children in noughts and yeses. She has other concerns."

"They sound like pleasant folk," observed Spike. "Wait. Didn't we attack a caravan of gypsies when we were in Romania? Darla's idea, if I remember correctly."

Drusilla nodded. "She wanted the evil gypsies to take the disgusting soul back, to return to us the Daddy that we knew. But they would not, could not, and so we ate their children." Her voice grew wistful, nostalgic.

"But, ducks, Angel couldn't have gotten his soul in Romania. Remember? We saw him in China just after that, during the Boxer Rebellion. And in New York in the 30's. And I saw him on a submarine—of all places—in the 50's."

"He pretended, Spike, Gonzago's murder enacted for you to see. He tried not to listen to the pixies who whispered lies, but to the truth, to the blood which called out with its siren song, so like a young girl's cries as her naked flesh is torn from her bone. But the pixies were too loud, Spike. They tormented him, as the gypsies had set them on to him to do, like the Erinyes, the Furies, avenging spirit which allow him no rest for the murder of the most beloved daughter of their tribe. Like mousetraps."

Spike shivered. "You make me almost feel sorry for the bastard."

"He needs it now, Spike. He has fallen in love with the pain, wants it, craves it, delights in it like a whip against his backside. He cannot live without it; it is an addiction even stronger than his thirst for blood, for the hunt. He does not fear losing it, because he does not know he can. Not yet."

Spike knew what Drusilla wanted as she spoke so longingly of the pain, of the inflicting. He himself was aroused by the passion of the words, of the force of her lust. But she was too weak, he knew, too fragile. He had to be gentle.

**

* * *

**

**Los Angeles, California—December 2003  
  
**"Vampire," came a voice from the shadows, deep but feminine. Sultry, even.

Spike looked up, let the enhanced night vision of his vampire eyes penetrate the darkness. "Slayer," he responded.

Faith stepped out of the shadows. "Strange thing meeting you here," she said. "Last time I saw you, you were a big hole out Sunnydale way."

"It's a long story."

"I'm listening."

"I came back. Short story, actually. Soul and all, if that's what you're worried about, although the body only showed up fairly recently."

"I'm sure B' would love to hear that you're alive. Or undead, at least."

Spike looked pained. "And then what? No, it's better the way it is, Faith. Let her mourn for me."

"She's going to find out sooner or later," said Faith. "You know that, right? And when she does, she's going to be world of mad."

"I can handle Buffy when it comes to that," Spike answered. "Sooner or later, yes. But not today."

Faith put up her hands. "It's your funeral, man. Or I guess you already had one. Two, even. We had a sort of memorial service after Sunnydale. Not just you—it was for Anya, the potentials, everyone who bought the farm when you closed the Hellmouth."

Spike nodded. "They deserve to be remembered," he agreed.

* * *

**Somewhere in Romania...  
  
**"Be in me," Drusilla said, gazing into Dawn's eyes. "See with your heart."

"Amanda?" Dawn asked, confused. "I thought you died, in Sunnydale."

Amanda laughed. "It takes more than that to kill a Slayer," she said.

"We thought we lost you, we really did. That's why we didn't bring you with us."

Amanda nodded. "I know," she said. "But I'm here now, and that's all that matters. I'll never leave you guys, Dawn."

Dawn smiled, knowing that what Amanda said was true. "We were looking for..." Dawn trailed off, uncomfortable. "It can't be you."

"Shh," said Amanda. "It is. Don't fight it. Isn't it better this way?"

_Yes,_ Dawn realized. It was much better. Her friend was alive. Isn't this how she always dreamed it would be? "We need to get out of here," she said. "She'll be back soon. I don't even know when she went away—"

"She?" asked Amanda.

Dawn opened her mouth to explain, then closed it, unable to remember what it was she was about to say.

"Look around you," said Amanda. "We're all alone. All alone to do whatever we want." She smiled and leant down and kissed Dawn, her tongue softly caressing the inside of Dawn's mouth. Dawn kissed back, enjoying having Amanda there with her, finally. "I missed you," Amanda said when their lips finally left each other again.

The kiss finished, Dawn looked at Amanda again, a half-formed thought insisting to be given attention. "But this isn't the way it, that is, we never, I wanted us to, but—" Dawn protested, unable to form her thought, articulate what it was that she wanted to say.

"This is the way it's supposed to be, Dawn. You know that, you feel that. Why do you keep resisting? Didn't you miss me?"

_Yes,_ thought Dawn as she unbuttoned the buttons of Amanda's blouse, _I missed you. This is the way it is supposed to be._

* * *

**Rio de Janeiro, Brazil  
  
**"Wow," said Willow. "My Goddess."

Kennedy looked up from the book she was reading. "What is it?" she asked as she jumped off their bed and stood behind Willow, peering over the witch's shoulder.

"E-BAY" proclaimed the website Willow was visiting. And, in smaller type, "Orb of Thesula," And in smaller still, "Current bid: $13,294,768.50."

"That's, erm, quite a sum," admitted Kennedy. "Do they know what that is?"

Willow shrugged. "Either that or somebody in cyberspace is willing to pay an awful lot for a paperweight. With the 'net the way it is, you never can know. The thing is, back in Sunnydale, you could just walk into the Magic Box and purchase one. It wouldn't be cheap, but it would be less than a years tuition to UC Sunnydale. Perhaps the Hellmouth was good for something after all."

"I thought you said you got a scholarship."

"I did. That's not the point. The point is, there's been an increased demand for spirit vaults for the rituals of the undead lately. Somebody's been buying them all up, driving the prices way up. And I mean way. As in paying for the tuition of the entire freshman class."

"A warlock?"

"Or a demonic capitalist. Who knows?"

* * *

**Somewhere in Africa...  
  
**The demon Yr-a't-kr, sheathed in the naked form of Samantha Finn, looks around at the ruins of what once was his temple. Time has not been good to it; the edifice has fallen into disrepair and is not only dirty, but in several places the walls have actually caved in. Yr-a't-kr, existing as he does outside time, is not used to the entropic effects of time striking in such a dramatic way, but he is grateful that it serves as a marker of when he has been summoned to.

_"Who dares disturb my temple?"_ Yr-a't-kr asks in a booming voice that his vessel's voice cords would not never have been capable of on their own. He looks down, takes in the body of the vessel. It is older than his priestesses would have been, but it is not unattractive.

He looks around. Did the vessel summon him on her own? No—he sees a man and a woman. "Distract her while I try to close the conduit!" the woman says. She is young, and he wishes for a moment she had been the vessel. What is, is, however, and this way he will be able to feel her body in his hands in a way which would not be possible if he had been inhabiting it.

The man comes at him with a sword. Yr-a't-kr laughs at his foolishness, thinking to harm the great demon Yr-a't-kr with a mere sword! With demon speed and skill, Yr-a't-kr dodges the sword, moving so fast that the bone and flesh of the human vessel cry out in protest. The man swings again, and the demon dodges it just as easily, stepping in towards him and then delivering a backhand to the jaw. The demon's enhanced strength sends the man flying into the colonnade, breaking a column.

The woman is chanting. Yr-a't-kr recognizes the language; it is a demon language, the one his own worshippers used when they wished to call him forth. The fabric of space and time answers to the language, warped by the power of its words, giving in to the force of the invocation. She seeks to sever his link between worlds, to trap him here, in a single place and time. He exists outside of time and space, but this human wishes to change that.

"Let the door between worlds be closed" she chants in that arcane language. "Let the link be severed and the demon—" She breaks off from the chant as Yr-a't-kr grabs her by the chin and begins to drain the life out of her.


	7. Catching our Breath

**_Catching our Breath  
_**by Alixtii

* * *

She's been through more than her fair share of late. She just needs a chance to catch her breath. She'll be alright."

—Giles, in "Spiral"

* * *

**Sunnydale, California—January 2001**

"How is that report coming, Lydia?"

Lydia Chalmer looked up from her laptop at Quentin Travers, who had just entered her hotel room. "Almost finished," she responded. "Just give me another 5 minutes."

"Can you give me a preview?" asked Travers. "The main ideas."

"The Slayer's methods are highly unorthodox, but she is ultimately capable. Under proper guidance, her innovativeness could be made an invaluable asset. Everything we already knew."

"And you are wondering why we had to cross an ocean and a continent to find out nothing new."

"With all due respect, sir, yes, I am."

"Lydia, do you know Roger Wyndam-Pryce?"

Lydia did not allow herself to be taken aback by the apparent non sequitor. Travers would get to the point in his own time. "I've met him three or four times," she acknowledged. "As I understand it, he's rather highly placed in the Council. Like yourself."

"Like myself," Travers echoed. "Yes, indeed. And what are your impressions of Wyndam-Pryce? Please, speak freely. I want to hear what you really think."

Lydia considered. "He is…ambitious. Ruthless, even."

Travers nodded. "I would go so far as to say power-hungry. It takes something of the nature of a Machiavel to rise to such rarefied heights, I am afraid. Lord Acton was right: absolute power corrupts absolutely. But you'll learn such lessons before too long; yes, Lydia, I see in you the potential to go far in the Council, although I rather suspect you will not be proud of yourself by the end of it. But Roger. He is a man in love with power, and he sees the Council as a means to that power. After all, our influence spans the entire globe, does it not? And we have less subtle resources. It was he who ordered the strike on the rogue Slayer Faith two years ago. What you cannot control, you must destroy.

"But he ignores one thing: that in the end, we are powerless. Yes, Lydia: for all our playing and scheming we cannot change the simple fact that we are not the Slayer. At the end of the day, the fate of the world rests in her hands, not ours."

Lydia looked at her superior in shock. "But what about 'the Slayer is the instrument'?"

Travers smiled—a somber, almost sad smile. "That," he answered, "is the true test we have come over to administer. There is a lesson the Slayer must learn if she is too succeed, and Rupert Giles with all his damnable interference seems to be dead-set against letting her learn it."

Lydia did not speak to fill the silence which followed. She knew that Travers would explain himself when it pleased him to do so, in the manner that he chose. After a moment, he asked another a question.

"Do you know the purpose of the Cruciamentum, Lydia?"

"A test," she answered, "of cunning, imagination, and confidence. To evaluate the Slayer's abilities and those of her Watcher. It is a rite of passage, dozens of centuries old." _And the reason why Rupert Giles was fired from the Council, why current arrangements with the Slayer are so strained._

Travers nodded. "Yes, it is all of those things. It is a test, just as this review is a test. But both tests are also lessons, that we are not her parents, not her friends, and not even necessarily her allies. She cannot always count to turning to us for help. Someday we will not be here, Lydia, and the Slayer will have to soldier on by herself. It is our job to prepare her for that day. Rupert seems unwilling to let her learn that lesson, insisting on loving her with a father's love. He doesn't seem to realize that the best thing he could do for his Slayer now is to get himself a one-way ticket back to England and return home. But I suppose we cannot blame Miss Summers for her Watcher's mistakes.

"Then you intend to give her the information she has asked for?"

Travers laughed. Like his smile, his laugh had a quality to it that was both sad and somber. "What else can we do?" he asked. ""As I said, we are powerless. In our hands this information is just another file in our already overfull vaults, useless to the world. In her hands, this information has the potential to save the world. But if she is going to do any good with it, she has to discover that she is the one with the power. That is the lesson this review will teach her: that in the end, there is only one Chosen One." He paused. "Well, two in this instance, but that's a special circumstance."

Travers let the room return to silence, as Lydia processed what he said. Such responsibility to be placed on a single girl without even her consent: the fate of the world.

"What do you think, Lydia?"

"About what, sir?"

"You've devoted your life to studying a vampire who was feared all through Europe. You are not unversed in the psychology—and the politics—of power."

Lydia nodded. "I met him, today, you know."

"I know." He said no more, letting her continue.

"As you said, I have studied this creature my entire life. And now, I see him, and he is so far from what I expected. Although in a way, that is what I expected. After all, my thesis emphasize how capable he was at adapting to new situations. With any other vampire, I would have said that what I saw today was impossible. With William the Bloody, it is merely implausible."

"Perhaps you had better fill me in on what you saw, Lydia."

Lydia paused, trying to decide how she could best explain what she had seen. "He seemed docile. A man who once cut a swath through Europe" (what was a swath anyway?) "is now acting as sidekick to the Slayer. He helps her kill demons, stop apocalypses. From his activities the last six months, one would never even guess he was an evil soulless creature."

Travers nodded. "Have you ever heard of Maggie Walsh?"

Lydia thought. "Wasn't she the daughter of John Walsh, the man who wrote the textbook on demon anatomy? Last I heard, she was teaching psychology at UC Sunnydale."

Travers nodded. "The professor has joined her late father, I'm afraid. She was acting as the head of the Sunnydale headquaurters of the States' Demon Initiative. Succeeded in implanting over two dozen Sunnydale vampires with a neuro-microchip which would emit an electrical shock resulting in extreme pain if a vampire attempted to harm a living creature. According to the intelligence the Council has procured, William the Bloody was number 17 in their project."

Lydia looked at Travers in shock. "Why wasn't I told of this?"

"The Americans do not take well to our distributing our knowledge of their classified activities at will. A certain level of discretion is required."

"But this information has to be integrated with the research we already have. The models need to be revised, we need to—" She trailed off. "And I know more about William the Bloody then anyone else in the Council."

"Which is why I am telling you this now, Lydia. Believe me, we have not forgotten you. It seemed to me that while it was needed to make this visit to Sunnydale, it would be worthwhile to perform some actual research--discretely--while we were here. Do you have a hypothesis yet?"

"No piece of electronics could turn William the Bloody into something he didn't want to be. It could act as the catalyst, certainly. But there's something more at work here. Something—" she trailed off.

"Yes?" Travers prompted.

"I don't know," she answered. "I'm going to have to go back to my research, see how this new information fits together. A vampire deprived of the ability of violence, it would have no reason to live. Chances were, it would go insane."

"Like—"

Lydia shook her head. "No, not like Drusilla, not necessarily. Drusilla's symptoms are of a severe schizophrenia, possibly dating back to severe stress she may have suffered as a human, prior to her turning. But all vampires are insane by human standards, the equivalent of a severe antisocial disorder, psycopathy, even. For a vampire to leave the vampiric norm and go insane by its own standards, we have no idea what that would look like. And this one has always been prone to obsessions, typically fixating all of his attention on just a few objects.

"We have no idea what he is capable of, right now. We need more research."

* * *

**Los Angeles, California — December 2003**  
  
"You really don't have your own digs?" Faith asked as she entered her hotel room, followed by the vampire. He didn't need an invitation to enter a hotel room she'd only inhabited for a few hours, so she didn't bother to provide one.

"I only became solid again fairly recently," Spike explained. "Angel doesn't know what to do with me, and refuses to do anything which would imply my welcome. I've shacked up in people's offices, mainly. A couple of nights I even went so far as to sleep at Harmony's."

"Harmony?" Faith asked, processing the name. "Harmony Kendall, the stuck-up blonde from Sunnydale High?"

"None other," agreed Spike. "I forgot you hung out around there for a year—that on-again, off-again year I spent with Dru after Angelus and Acathla, God save me from the memory. She was turned the day of her graduation, I'm told, although heaven only knows what was going through the mind of the vamp who sired her."

Faith shrugged. "Probably looking for a fuckbuddy. I'm guessing your own visits were less than platonic? Or more?"

Spike nodded, distracted. "Harmony may not have much in the brains department, but she is good for some things. Just a little stress-relief, nothing more. Nothing like what I had with Buffy, even when I was without my soul. Just shag and move on, you know the drill."

"Hey," said Faith, "that's my favourite type of shag. And from what I can tell, Buffy isn't exactly waiting for you in Rome, either. Of course, she thinks you're dead, so her behaviour is probably slightly more excusable."

"Whatever happened to that guy you were with? The principal, tried to kill me?"

Faith shrugged. "Robin? I'm not big on the whole commitment thing. I got bored; he didn't. It was ugly for a while, but thing worked themselves out in the end, at least once Robin left Cleveland."

"That where you spending your days now? Cleveland?"

"The thrill of living on a Hellmouth. B's gotten her full, but I figure I've got some catching up to do, between prison and the coma and her getting there before me and all. It's not so bad. The big city, always something new to do, something to kill, someone to fuck. What more can you ask for?"

"So what brings you to L.A.?"

"I need to keep a watch on Angel," Faith answered. "Some of the Council seem to fear he may lose his soul soon."

"Any idea why?"

Faith thought. She wasn't supposed to alert Angel of her presence here, in part because of his connexion with Drusilla. But Spike shared that same connexion; she was his sire, and had been his lover for over a century. "No clue. That's the Council for you, tell you only what they think you need to know."

"Bloody bureaucrats," Spike agreed.

Faith sighed, relieved that she had gotten away with her lie. "Hey, I need to take a shower. You okay out here? The TV has pay-for–porn, feel free to use it; supposedly the Council's covering our expenses on this mission, which pleased G' to no end."

"I'll manage," answered Spike. "You go do what you need to do."

* * *

**Somewhere in Romania...  
  
**"Dawn?" cried out Buffy. "Can you hear me?"

Where had her sister gone? And how could Buffy have let that happen? Why did she let Dawn talk her into sleeping? It was her duty to protect her sister, not the other way around. And now she had failed. "Dawn!" she cried out again, making her way through the forest. If anything had happened to the girl, she'd....

Suddenly, she saw movement out of the corner of her eye. As she came closer, she realized it was two people, half-naked, their bodies in tight embrace as they made out quite passionately. As she came even closer, she realized it was two women, and furthermore she recognized the two women: it was Dawn and Drusilla. _And hands! In places!_

"Dawn?" she asked. "What are you doing?" _Those hands...in those places..._

Dawn didn't answer, as if she hadn't heard. After a while, Buffy heard Dawn moan, "Amanda."

_Amanda? What the—?_ "Dawn, it's not Amanda," Buddy urged her sister. "Amanda died, last August, in Sunnydale. She was broken in half by a Turok- han. Incinerated when Sunnydale blew up! It's Drusilla, she must have hypnotized you. Please, listen to me!"

Still, Dawn made no indication of having heard her sister, but Buffy just stood there for several moments more, just watching, dumbfounded, in morbid fascination as her sister and the vampire went at it.

_Enough_, she finally thought to herself, and went to the pair and threw Drusilla off Dawn.

* * *

**Somewhere in Africa...**  
  
Riley Finn plunged his sword into his wife's side, thinking of how much she was going to kill him when she got her body back. The action resulted in the desired consequence, however; distracted, the demon dropped Catelyn and turned towards Riley. Obviously weak but still alive, Catelyn pulled herself off the floor and spoke a few more syllables in a language Riley could not understand before she collapsed back to the floor.

_"No!"_ the demon raged. _"You think you can trap me on this pitiful plane? I am Yr-a't-kr, transcending time and space!"_

"You used to transcend time and space," corrected Riley. "Now it seems to me you're pretty much the ordinary guy, just like the rest of us."

_"Not quite,"_ the demon corrected as it effortlessly caught Riley's sword with its left hand. He swung it, sending Riley into the colonnade once again. Another column broke, and the temple began to shake as the weight of the dome began to shift. Riley ran to Catelyn's side, pulled her out of danger as the dome came tumbling down.

"Riley?" Catelyn asked.

"I'm here," Riley said, leaning down to check her for injuries. She had some large bruises, some internal bleeding, but mostly it seemed that her current debilitated state was due to the demon sucking all of the life out of her. "We're safe . . . for now."

"I need to . . . do the exorcism," she managed to get out, although every word was very clearly a struggle. "Get that . . . thing . . . out of . . . Sam."

"You're too weak," said Riley. "You need to rest."

She was already unconscious.

* * *

**Somewhere in Romania...**  
  
Dawn and Amanda were, well, getting reacquainted, when suddenly someone came up and threw the two apart. Dawn's eyes refused to focus on the person for a moment, although she seemed eerily familiar, until Amanda said "It's Drusilla, Dawn," and then Dawn realized her friend was right.

Wondering for only a moment how Amanda even knew what Drusilla looked like, Dawn reached for her machete. "She's killed Slayers before," she told Amanda. "Be careful."

"I'm not worried," answered Amanda as she dodged the dagger in the vampire's hand. "I have you to watch my back."

"Damn right," agreed Dawn as she swung her machete at the vampire. Drusilla effortlessly stepped out of the weapon's reach, as if she had been able to predict Dawn's attack.

"Dawnie, it's me," said Drusilla, but Amanda interrupted.

"Don't listen to her! She'll use her thrall!" Drusilla responded by unleashing a ferocious backhand, knocking Amanda several feet. "Come on, Dawn," Amanda cried, "we have to get out of here!"

As Dawn and Amanda ran away from the vampire, Dawn could see out of the corner of her eye a figure set upon by a pack of wolves.


	8. Crisis Points

**_Crisis Points  
_**by Alixtii

* * *

"I cannot believe that you, of all people, are trying to Scully me. There is something supernatural at work here. Get your books! Look stuff up!"

—Buffy, in "The Pack"

**

* * *

**

**London, England—November 2002**  
  
"They took our files, wiped out our records. We've lost contact with operations in Munich, Switzerland and Rome. We've got casualty confirmations coming in from as far away as Melbourne."

"Sir," Lydia summarized her colleague's report, "we are crippled."

"It's all right, Lydia. We are still masters of our fate, still captains of our souls."

"Yes, sir," Lydia answered, but she didn't feel her mentor's confidence. She was worried.

Travers cleared his throat. "Ladies and gentlemen, our fears have been confirmed. The First Evil has declared all-out war on this institution. Their first volleys proved most effective. I, for one, think it's time we struck back. Give me confirmations on all remaining operatives. Visuals and tacticals. Highest alert. Get them here as soon as possible. Begin preparations for mobilization. Once we're accounted for, I want to be ready to move."

"Sir?" someone asked, voicing the confusion that Lydia felt.

"We'll be paying a visit to the Hellmouth," he explained. "My friends, these are the times that define us. Proverbs 24:6. _Oh, by wise council, you shall make your war._"

And then it happened. Fire, was everywhere, obscuring Lydia's sight completely. There was nothing but conflagration, ripping through the world. There was nothing Lydia could turn to escape the flames, nowhere she could go. She tried to cry out, but her shout was silent compared to the din of the explosion.

Only then did it occur to her to wonder at the fact that she was not already dead.

* * *

**London, England—December 2003**

Reginald sat in the library, scanning the obscure texts for references of the vampire Drusilla when Lydia came up behind him and covered his eyes. "Guess who," she whispered as she brought her lips to the back of his neck and began to nuzzle.

Reginald started so greatly he practically jumped out of his seat. "Lydia, please," he said. "Not here. What if Wyndam-Pryce walks by? What if someone sees and notices, tells someone who tells someone..."

"Reginald, relax," said Lydia. "Look around you—everyone's just like you were, with their noses buried so deep in their books they wouldn't know if the sky turned colours. Nobody's going to notice. We're safe."

Reginald did seem to relax somewhat, his body regaining a more natural posture, but didn't seem completely satisfied either. "My nose should be buried as well. I need to finish the bloody thing."

Lydia sat down on his desk. "Calm down. Your thesis is going to turn out fine. I promise."

"Well, there's still another two-thirds of the dissertation committee I'm going to have to impress with thing, and I have twenty pages left to write. And research."

"Shouldn't you be done your research by now?"

"Yes," agreed Reginald. "But I keep on being distracted by my lover who drags me off to have wild sex. It's a wonder I get any work done at all."

"Well, where exactly are you?" Lydia asked, picking up one of the books sitting on the desk. _Aurelius and His Children_ by Diana Wescar. She looked at the others in the stack. _Angelus' Women_, by Deborah Giles. _The Prophecies of Aurelius_, translated by Archibald Pryce. _The Queens of the Night_ by Martha Landau. _Aspects of the Demon Psyche_ by J.S. Zeitchmier. _Mind and Mysticism: An Inquiry into Demon Psychology and Neurology_ by John Walsh. She picked up the last book and began to read it to herself, opening at a random page.

_One must remember that the vampire is a peculiar creature, a paradox, even. It is a corpse, dead and cold. Its heart does not beat; its blood does not circulate through its veins (although admittedly they bleed much more copiously than the average corpse); it does not breathe in the normal sense of the word. Still, it is in some sense a biological creature. It must rely on its physical form to procure the blood it requires for sustenance. It can engage in sexual intercourse, although admittedly it cannot procreate. Its vocal chords operate in some way that is still a mystery, and they have been seen to smoke cigarettes, cigars, pipes, marijuana joints, etc. While they have a greater tolerance to alcohol than the average human, they can become intoxicated. In fact, they are succeptible to the short-term effects of a large range of pharmaceuticals, including nicotine, LSD, and several analgesics. Snap a vampire's spinal cord, and it will become temporally paralyzed, although it is capable of regenerating the damage._

_So it is with the vampiric brain. The relation between the brain of the host body and the demon which inhabits in it is unclear. Certainly the brain cannot be used in the manner normal for humans, for without circulation that would be impossible. Still, the brain is clearly necessary for vampire cognition. Damage to the cerebellum can result in severe retardation, although in most cases it too is capable of regeneration over time, resulting in a restoration of the vampire's full original faculties, assuming it does not mindlessly wander into the sun during the period of retardation. Similarly, prolonged starvation (from blood) can result in impairment of higher brain functions which can be catastrophic._

_Furthermore, it has already been documented (Wyndam 1869; Jones 1928) that some psychological disorders suffered by an individual in life will in many case continue to afflict the vampire he or she becomes after being turned. Disorders with which this is known to be the case include, but are not limited to: paranoia, schizophrenia, severe phobias, panic disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, communication skills disorders, and some learning disabilities. Other disorders, such as clinical depression, do not seem to transfer. Of course, there are also some disorders, such as psycopathy, antisocial disorders, and oppositional defiant disorder, which represent the vampiric norm rather than a deviation. Why such symptoms persist—whether it is merely an aspect of the human personality which goes on to inform the formation of the human-demon hybrid (the vampiric personality), or whether the biological causes of the original conditional continue to afflict the vampire—remains a mystery._

_It would follow, however, that manipulation of the vampiric brain should result in a resulting alteration of the vampire's behavior in a manner somewhat analogous to the practices of human psychology. Electrical stimulation of portions of the vampire's brain, for example, could result in...._

Lydia looked up from the text. "Do we still have Quentin Travers' notes on Zackary Kralik?" she asked.

"What?" asked Reg, looking up from his work. "Oh, yes. I had them checked out when the explosion happened. The similarities are mostly superficial, though. Kralik was, according to Travers' notes, a sufferer of intermittent explosive disorder, paraphilia, conduct disorder, and possibly OCD in life. All of those symptoms represent the normal characteristics of the typical vampire, with the possible exception of the obsessive- compulsive disorder. Drusilla, on the other hand, is a schizophrenic, showing symptoms of delusions, visual and auditory hallucinations, verbal incoherence, and dementia. Of course, there is no way of knowing how much of that is an affect of her Sight; after all, she quite literally sees things no one else does on a regular basis, and I'd have to imagine it'd be difficult to put into words what she sees. But there's no record of any other precognitive vampire being quite so...eccentric. In any case, there is no reason to assume her amorality or her taste for sadomasochism—her most pronounced characteristic, next to insanity—stem from anything other than her own demonic nature and her learning at Angelus' knee—quite literally in some aspects, we can assume.

"We can't even be sure that she went crazy before Angelus turned her. That's just the least hypothesis, since there's no indication that great stress or trauma can awaken the necessary genetic factors in vampires the way it can in humans. Besides, it'd be easier for Angelus to drive her mad—if he was the one responsible—when she was a human. But we can't be sure. We haven't been able to definitively identify who she had been in life, though, so its impossible to know for sure what happened. Although after reviewing this research, I'd bet my last shilling she was Roman Catholic, which suggests she wasprobably involved in the Sisters of Mercy Massacre in 1860—we have eyewitness accounts of Angelus and Darla in London around that time—although whether she was involved as the predator or the prey I couldn't tell you. We don't get a definitive sighting of Drusilla until the early 1870s although there are plenty of sightings before that which are speculated to be her. I even have one source which suggests that Darla rather than Angelus turned her and that she is older than Angelus, although there's no way that could possibly be right. It doesn't fit her MO—she's without a doubt a Victorian."

"Maybe you should put a call into Wolfram or Hart. I'm sure either Angel or Spike knows what happened, although I don't know how thrilled they be to share." Lydia shut the Walsh text in her lap. "You seem to have this pretty well down," she said, returning the book to the pile. "You sure you don't want to go find that wild lover you were talking about?"

Reginald shook his head. "She is a wicked girl and she tries to corrupt me."

* * *

**Somewhere in Romania...**

"We don't have much time," Drusilla says, behind the mask of the Amanda-child. She found the mask deep within the buried desires of the Key, and now that she has stirred them the Key is full of a passion it has not known before. Drusilla likes this mask; it is pretty, after all. She envies the vampire who had had the pleasure of breaking the girl in two.

"What are we to do?" asks Dawn, not understanding. Drusilla must constantly renew the thrall, the girl's quick mind constantly trying to sort through the confusion, her curiosity searching for the answers that Drusilla must keep obscured or else the illusion will be broken.

"A spell," answers Amanda. "I need you to read this."

Dawn takes the piece of paper that Amanda hands her. _Quod perditum est, invenietur._ "It's Latin," she says. "It means…" She looks at Amanda and suddenly finds her grasp of the language faltering. What does it mean again? She cannot remember the vocabulary.

"Please," insists Amanda.

Dawn shrugs. "_Quod perditum est, invenietur._"

Amanda smiles, then closes her eyes. "Not dead... nor of the living," she recites. "Spirits of the interregnum, I call. Return to the body what distinguishes man from the beast."

A third voice breaks in on Dawn's consciousness, an older female voice marked by a thick Eastern European accent. "_Nici mort, nici de-al finite_," it goes. "_Te invoc, spirit al trecerii. Reda trupului ce separa omul de animal._"

"So it shall be," says Amanda.

"_Asa sa fie_," echoes the voice.

"Restore me."

"_Utrespur aceastui_."

* * *

**Somewhere in Nevada…**

"Did you feel that, Beth?" Ethan asked the boy.

Although he was blind, Beth Daniels cocked his head up as if he were looking at Ethan. "I felt it," he answered simply, then returned to the chalk drawing he was working on.

Beth Daniels was, as near as Ethan could tell, sixteen or seventeen years old. What the boy had done to land himself in the detention center was a mystery to everyone, although Ethan secretly thought that the kid had probably used black magic to kill his parents in revenge for their naming him Beth. _A boy named Sue, indeed…_

"What are you drawing?" asked Ethan. The boy was incredibly sensitive to the currents of chaos and order, good and evil which ran through the world, and often he was Ethan's only way of telling what was going on in the world outside.

"This is the past," he said, pointing to a picture of a giant ferris wheel—_the wheel of life,_ Ethan realized. "This is the present." This picture was half-finished, and Beth worked on it with meticulous detail. There was a picture of a woman, slender with raven black hair, reaching out to a man that Beth had sketched only in rough outline. The lovers.

Ethan knew the meaning of the tarot, knew what a change from the wheel to the lovers meant: out of the constant flux of life, some type of crisis point had been reached. Some trial was at hand. "And what of the future?"

Beth held his hand over the drawing, and suddenly the chalk image began to change, the colours shifting and rearranging themselves into a new pattern, one instantly recognizable to Ethan: the robed figure of Death. Change. Transformation. Even drawn in chalk upon the pavement, the image was intimidating.

"Whose fortune is this, Beth?" Ethan asked, almost afraid to find out the answer. _Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee._

The boy made some strokes on the pavement with his chalk, etched out the rough outline of a woman, slender in figure. He picked up a piece of chalk which was charcoal black and began to draw what would be her raven tresses. It was the figure from before, Ethan recognized, the lover. In her hands, Beth drew a large five-pointed star. The Queen of Pentacles, then. In the sky above the two figures, the Queen and Death, Beth draws more stars and, at the center of the blue sky, an archangel blowing his trumpet. Judgment day.

Ethan smiled to himself, making a brief gesture with his left hand invoking the good will of Janus. If Beth's prophecy were to be trusted—and he had never known the boy's drawings to lead him wrong before—things were just about to get interesting, and there would be plenty of chaos to go around.

* * *

**London, England**

"How was your flight?" asked Lydia.

The contractor shrugged. It seemed to Reg that she was just a bit….unconvential. Particularly in her dress. But someone with a reputation like hers could get away with dressing however she wanted, he supposed. "I'm not fond of crossing oceans," she admitted. "Water gives me the heebie-jeebies. You know?"

Lydia nodded. "You understand what we need from you, Miss Raiden?"

"I go in, snag the Thesulac, and boogey off with it. And then give it to you. Trust me, I'm a professional."

Being a professional thief didn't exactly engender trust, Reginald mused. But he remained silent, let Lydia take care of the negotiations.

"Your usual rate of commission will be satisfactory, I assume?" Lydia asked.

The contractor nodded. "And with the Orbs of Thesula currently having a street value of a sweet 13 mill…."

"….that brings your commission to approximately a million pounds."

"2 million _dollars_," she corrected, "and some pocket change to boot."

Lydia sighed. "It will practically drain our coffers, but very well. We need the orb."

The contractor smiled. "I thought you Watcher people were rolling in the cash."

Lydia looked at the contractor. "Many things," she said, "have changed in the last two years."

* * *

**A/N:** Some of the titles and authors used in this chapter have been taken from the bibliography of the version of Lydia's thesis found on the 'net. keeps eating my links, probably afraid its porn. Try using Google.) While that thesis is not consistent with this story (in this story, I blame Lydia for getting Spike's age wrong; in that thesis, she corrects the mistake), I have to admit that it was at least one of many influences in writing this. Giving credit where credit is due, here. 

And expect more references to John Walsh in future chapters.

I do not own _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_. Although if you thought I did, I do happen to own a bridge in Brooklyn that I can sell you. Or would you prefer a sandbox in Florida? A galley full of Spanish prisoners?

Please review. Thank you, please come again. And review then, too.

Alixtii.


	9. When Hell Freezes Over

**_When Hell Freezes Over  
_**by Alixtii

* * *

"You know, I started it. The whole having a soul. Before it was all the cool new thing."

—Angel, in "Chosen"

* * *

**London, England—December 2002**  
  
Lydia Chalmers, formerly of the Watcher's Council of Britain, sat down at her dining room table and began to eat. Alone. She was alone, now. Her vocation, her colleagues, her mentor—all of these had been stolen from her by the First.

"I told you that there would be a time when we would no longer be there for the Slayer," a familiar voice rung out from behind her. "I simply did not expect it to be so soon."

Lydia looked back to see Quentin Travers watching her with curiosity, his sad smile upon his face. "You're not him," she said simply.

"Oh?" he asked. "Then who am I?"

"The First Evil," she answered, "absolute wickedness older than men and demons, something we cannot even conceive. Beyond sin, beyond death, you are the thing the darkness fears. You are everywhere: every being, every thought, every drop of hate."

"Yes, that's you, Lydia, always with the textbook answer. The perfect scholar. If I ask you about the Slayer, will you go all 'Into each generation, a Slayer is born' on me?"  
Lydia did not answer. It wasn't him.

"Maybe you don't understand how this works," he said. "I am the First Evil, certainly, beyond your comprehension, but in this form I am also Quentin Travers. I have his memories, his mannerisms, everything. He was proud of you, you know that? I was proud of you."

_Don't think about the pain. Don't let him get to you._ "What do you want?"

"But now, look at you. You have no direction, no purpose. You've become useless. This is not why I protected you."

"What?"

"What did you think, Lydia, that you just had remarkably good luck? Please. We make our own luck. Fortune favours the brave."

"And I earned having my colleagues—not to mention my mentor, whose form you are now defaming—blow up around me, how, exactly?"

"Lydia, you were never one to lack long-term vision. Sometimes what is required of us is not as we would like it. Think of it as your Cruciamentum. Necessary...in the end. I have plans. They don't require a bunch of Watchers thinking they could win a war against me. It's not their war. You know very well that in the end, there's only two people in this war that matter."

"You," said Lydia. "And the Slayer."

"One girl, chosen to fight—but you know it, don't you? You have it memorized. Only no longer. Soon there will be no more potential Slayers. No more Watchers to train them. And then, when I have the two Slayers killed, no more of anything."

"You may find her a more capable foe than you expect."

"Her unpredictability and heterodox methods may yet prove to be an asset? That's what you told me two years ago, isn't it. And I didn't listen and now I'm dead. But I haven't forgotten. That's why you are still alive."

"You lie."

"What is the first lesson a Watcher learns, Lydia?" That was classic Quentin Travers style: to ask a question in true Socratic form, and only afterwards to relate the answer back to the matter at hand.

"To separate truth from illusion," she answered. "In a world of magicks, it being the hardest thing to do."

"Yes! Another textbook answer. Look into my eyes, Lydia, and tell me that I am merely an illusion. A mere phantasm, the First Evil playing tricks on your mind. I am the truth, the hard-core reality. Good is the illusion, the lie. Only I am real, and deep within yourself, you know it is true."

* * *

**London, England—December 2003  
  
**"Bloody hell," Lydia said in response to the knock on her door. It was followed by an even stronger expletive when she looked through the peephole and saw who was standing on the other side.

It was Roger Wyndam-Pryce.

"It's Wyndam-Pryce," Lydia said to Reginald in as loud a whisper as she could manage.

"Dear God," said Reginald, his face suddenly ashen. "What are we to do?"

Lydia loved Reginald, but he did tend to be a little overawed by authority. If there was anything she had learned from Quentin Travers, it was that the person with the power was not always the person everyone thought it was. "Get dressed," she answered as she pulled on her own blouse. "You're my advisee, and we're working a case together. You have a perfectly legitimate reason for being here."

Dressed, she opened the door. If Wyndam-Pryce had been phased by the delay in her answering his knock, he didn't show it. He simply stepped inside, as if it were his flat and not hers. "Reginald, I'm glad you're here. This is subject to Lydia's approval—that's why I came here—but it concerns you." He paused dramatically, and Reginald just stood there, hanging on every word."

But Lydia had had enough of that. "Out with it, Roger. What is it?"

"Well, you know that the sudden increase in the number of Slayers, along with the unfortunate decrease in the Council's numbers, has put an enormous strain on the Council's resources, both financially and in terms of personnel. As a response to this, the Council has decided to tap into our pool of talented young Watchers-in-Training and begin pairing them with Slayers prior to the final reception of their thesis."

"'The _Council_ has decided'?" asked Lydia. He meant that _he_ had decided. Any decision made by "the Council" as an entity would have to go through her. She had made sure of that when she agreed to help Wyndam-Pryce rebuild the Council.

"As I said, Lydia, it is subject to your agreement. Although we really have no choice."

"I must agree. And in terms of Reginald, I see no reason why he isn't capable of handling his own charge. I trust you have an assignment in mind already?"

* * *

**Es-Lazur, Hell Dimension  
  
**"Miss Morgan is expecting you."

Eve nodded and made her way down the hallway to the door of the deceased lawyer.

"Come in, Eve," Lilah said. "Please sit down. How are you?"

"Well," answered Lilah, uncomfortable. Hell dimensions tended to do that to one. Not for the first time, Eve mentally thanked the Senior Partners for making her immortal; permanent residency here would have been more than she could have stood. "Yourself?"

"My workplace is quite literally a hell," answered Lilah. "What do you think?"

"My apologies. I—"

"Enough of that. A few weeks ago, your universe was thrown into catastrophic turmoil due to the corporalization of a certain vampire."

"Spike." Eve felt her heartrate suddenly increase. Had they found out? What would they do to her if they found out? At the very least they'd remove her immortality, pass it on to the next liaison. Eve couldn't imagine spending her entire afterlife in Es-Lazur or a similar dimension, and didn't want to find out what the experience was like the hard way.

"As you know, it took a great deal of the Senior Partners resources to temporarily stabilize the universal equilibrium."

"They're still working on finding out what happened," Eve insisted. "Someone will figure it out: Fred, Lorne, Wesley..." As always, there was a miniscule flinch at the mention of Wesley's name. It was Eve's trump card, the one thing she could use to distract Lilah's attention. _They better not figure out what happened_, she thought to herself.

"I don't have to tell you that the fulfillment of the Shanshu prophecy is inextricably linked with the business of the L.A. branch, Eve, especially in light of recent events."

"Angel will be on our side during the apocalypse. Or Spike. Or both," Eve promised.

"Or someone else?"

Eve paused. "What do you mean?"

"As of 6 o'clock this morning—Pacific time, of course—there is a third souled vampire loose on Earth. Of course, she may nonetheless find herself on the pointy end of Buffy Summers' stake. Or she may end up a Champion and play a pivotal rôle in the Apocalypse. Whichever future comes to pass, Eve, the Senior Partners are relying on you to make sure that it benefits the firm. Do you understand?"

"I'll have Angel get his team on it at once."

Lilah shook her head. "The vampire is Angel's chylde and Spike's sire. Neither of them is to find out what has happened. Do you understand?"

"But how am I to—"

"The resources of both our Cleveland and Rome branches will be made available to you for this project. I recommend that you make good use of them. The stakes are too high to risk disappointing the Senior Partners, Eve. It isn't safe. Believe me, I know."

* * *

**Somewhere in Romania...  
  
**A vampire with a soul is like a child without her skin, Drusilla knows. Vampires are creatures of the night, predators, capable of killing without qualm or conscience. That is who they are, it is the very core of their being. Nothing can change that, just as not even the sharpest dagger will make a shadow lavender instead of black. But the soul tries, the dirty souls which whisper to Dru's boys and divided their family, drove Grandmother back to her Master with the bloody mouth.

They became aberrations, both of them. Angel was driven into the streets for a hundred years feeding on rodents, Spike to the shadows of a basement, to the Hellmouth, muttering nonsense. (But who is Drusilla to separate sense from nonsense? People who live in glass houses should not bathe in blood quite so extravagantly, lest the neighbours see her underskirts lying on the floor.) They both were driven insane.

But Drusilla is already insane, and so as everything she has done over a century of vampiric unlife comes back to haunt her, she only steps further into her dementia. The pixies will protect her; the stars whisper it to her.

Drusilla knows what it is to witness atrocities, terrible happenings over which she has no control. She learned the lesson when Angelus murdered her family and massacred her convent. She relearns the lessons each time the stars whisper their horrible secrets to her, show her a future she does not choose. She has learned to detach herself from the world, to accept what she cannot change, to retreat into her own insanity.

This is how she has survived so long.

* * *

**London, England  
  
**Gwen Raiden made her way above the top of the London building. She was calm and composed, as she always was on a job (at least until something went wrong). After all, this job was supposed to be completely routine. Of course, in her business, there was no such thing as a completely routine job.

She made her way to the cable which connected the mansion to the power cables which ran down the street. Caution, a sign said. Hot. There was a lightning bolt symbol, and the cable was surrounded by a metal grill.

Pulling out a small pair of wire cutters, Gwen cut a hole through the grill large enough for her to fit her hand through. Then she passed her hand through the hole, and wrapped her fist around the hot cable.

For a moment, she simply let herself feel the current, the gentle rhythm of the energy flowing through the wire. Then, she caused the power to spike, once and then again. Just enough to knock out the mansion's "sophisticated" security system—sophisticated enough to have cost the owner a pretty penny, undoubtedly, but grossly inferior to some she had penetrated. And hell, she was still in one piece, wasn't she?  
Even better, even, as she thought of the LISA chip which sat on her desk back at her hotel room.

She strapped herself into her harness and lowered herself off the side of the building, stopping in front of a large window on the top story. She opened the window, unsurprised to find it unlocked. After all, people falling out would have been more of a concern than people getting in, at this height.

She made her wall through the chamber, silently slipping through the wall. She had memorized the plans provided her by the Watcher's Council, and knew she had to enter the third room on the left. A small electronic device sat above the doorknob, containing a small scanner and an LCD display asking for Gwen's thumbprint. Smilingly, Gwen placed her finger on the scanner, providing just enough extra electricity to short the circuit and unlock the door.

Gwen had been told she could expect to find the Thesulac in this room. The information she had been given by the Council, however, had not prepared her for what she saw. Instead of a single Orb of Thesula, there were rows and rows of the orbs. Dozens, scores...hundreds? Gwen thought furiously for a moment. She had been offered two million dollars by the Council for a single orb. How much could she sell the others for (on the internet? to an auction house? to one of her black market contacts?) if she managed to abscond them all? She was already richer than she herself could imagine, but there was no doubt in her mind that she would be able to find a use for the money.


	10. Strange Bedfellows

**_Strange Bedfellows  
_**by Alixtii

* * *

"What's more real? A sick girl in an institution? Or some kind of super girl, chosen to fight demons and save the world. That's ridiculous. A girl who sleeps with a vampire she hates. Yeah, that makes sense. " 

—Buffy, in "Normal Again"

* * *

**Los Angeles, California—December 2002**

Lydia held her cross tightly as she made her way through the darkness. With the sun blotted out in L.A., people had been leaving in hordes, and the place had become overrampant with vampires and other demons who enjoyed the constant cover of darkness. But what she needed was in L.A. She would have braved as many hordes of demons as necessary in order to find out what she needed to know.

Here was the building she wanted: _the Hyperion Hotel_. She entered.

And who should she see but Wesley Wyndam-Pryce. She should have known this wasn't going to be easy. "Lydia," he greeted her without any warmth.

"Wesley," she echoed in the same intonation. For a moment, they just looked daggers at each other, and then Wesley spoke.

"As you can see," he said, "we are far too busy right now for the Council to interfere. We have a...situation on our hands."

"An apocalypse," Lydia corrected. Wesley nodded, accepting the term. "The Council is gone, Wesley—destroyed," she told him. "Haven't you heard?"

Wesley looked up at her, in shock. Then he seemed to gain control of himself and his features regained their granite impassivity. "As I said, we have been busy, Lydia."

Still, Lydia could the see the question which played across his face, as impassive as he tried to make it. And the struggle he was going through to not ask it.

So Lydia answered it for him. "Your father is fine. He wasn't in the Council building when it blew." Wesley didn't say a word, just looked at her expectantly, to explain her own presence. "But I was. I was standing mere feet away from Quentin Travers, and now there is nothing left of him but dust and ash. He was vaporized in the force of the explosion. All of them—destroyed utterly. Except me."

"And you want to know why you were saved."

"Krevlornswath, he's here. I need to see the Anagogic."

"He's not seeing clients currently. As I said, we have other concerns that—"

"Wesley," she let her voice display some of the desperation she felt, "I need to know. I came all the way from London, through that interminable darkness out there, to find out. You can't turn me away, now."

"Don't worry, sweetcheeks," came a voice from the stairs. "Ol' Wes won't turn you away. After all, we help the helpless. That's what we do, isn't it?" Lydia turned with relief to see the green-skinned demon descending from the steps.

"Miss Chalmers is most certainly not helpless," Wesley pointed out.

"Sure, but everybody needs a little extra help sometime, right? Why don't you sing a little something for me?"

Lydia nodded, with relief, and began to sing in a soft voice which came from her lower registers:

**"One Tin Soldier" words and music by Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter. Lyrics deleted due to this site's policy.**

The demon nodded. "Classic survivor guilt. The Powers intervene to save your life, and you wonder 'why me?'. Why not—Quentin Travers?"

Lydia nodded. "My mentor," she explained.

"Well, I can't tell you why you lived and this Quentin chap died. Why the Powers choose who they choose—not my business. All I know is they have plans for you, and they didn't involve you blowing up in a building with a bunch of stuffy British guys. No offense to you or Wes."

"None taken," said Wes as he continued to do whatever he had been doing.

"And what are those plans?" Lydia insisted. "Do they want to use me for good, or ill?"

"Well, that's where you come in," explained the demon. "A pesky little thing humans have. It's called free will. You want my advice, don't go around looking gift horses in the mouth. Sometimes, they bite. You're alive—take advantage of it." Suddenly, he turned somber. "It's been coming to you, hasn't it?"

Lydia nodded. "The First Evil. It's been taking his form. Telling me—" She paused, then began to speak again. "He told me that he's what saved me. That I was going to destroy the world. Is it true?"

Lorne looked pained. "Look, I don't know exactly who it was upstairs that engineered your little not-dying thing. But if it was this First Evil, it's up to you to make sure that it gets more than it bargained for." He sighed. "You know, I think you would benefit from a talk with the broody guy."

_A Watcher taking council from a vampire?_ It was absurd. To her surprise, however, she found herself agreeing. She wasn't a Watcher anymore, anyway, and her world had already been turned upside down.

* * *

**Los Angeles, California—December 2003**

"Is something wrong, honey? You look worried."

"I am worried," said Eve. "What if they find out about Spike, about what we did? What then, Lindsey?"

"_They_?"

"The Senior Partners," clarified Eve. "If they found out, you know what will happen."

Lindsey stood up and walked over to eve, put his arms around her and rested his chin on her shoulder. "They won't find out," he promised her. "This is what we wanted to happen. They're taking notice. That's good."

Eve pulled away, breaking free from Lindsey's embrace. "They've noticed. The Shanshu plays a large part in their plans—whatever those plans are—and we've interfered with that. And now there's a third ensouled vampire."

"A third?" The incredulity in Lindsey's voice was apparent.

"Another Aurelian," explained Eve. "Angel's childe; Spike's sire."

"Drusilla," Lindsey said. There was a hardness, an edge.

"You know her?" asked Eve.

"She revamped Darla," answered Lindsey, letting it stay at that.

Eve frowned. _Darla_. Although her name was seldom mentioned, Eve kept on coming into contact with the vampire's shadow. Even after the events on Hallowe'en, which neither she nor Angel had any real control over, she had heard all those whispered quips about how it was always blondes.

"She has a soul now," Eve told Lindsey. "The Senior Partners want me to—I don't even know what it is they want me to do! But they're keeping an eye on me, and on Spike. They are going to figure something out. Or else Drusilla will do what they don't want her to do and I'm going to take the fall."

"Don't talk like that," said Lindsey. "The Senior Partners don't own you, not any longer. Whatever happens, I'll protect you."

But as Lindsey held her in his strong arms, Eve wondered if even he could protect her from the wrath of the Senior Partners. Whatever Lindsey thought, whatever Eve wanted to believe, the truth was, they _did_ still own her.

* * *

**Somewhere in Africa...**

"Riley?"

"Finally, you're awake," Riley said with relief. Catelyn had scared him; he knew she had been weakened from Yr-a't-kr's energy-sucking thing and had feared she would not wake. Catelyn was his friend, and he did not want to see her come to harm. Besides, she was his only link to Sam now, the only chance of expelling the demon who now controlled his wife's body. "Drink this," he said, holding a flask of hot tea to Catelyn's lips. It was a special blend that Sam and he had learned to make while on operation in China.

Catelyn drank it, then coughed. She tried to get up, but Riley put his hand on her shoulder, suddenly very conscious of the physicality of the gesture. "You're still weak," he told her. "You need to rest."

"Where's Sam?" Catelyn asked.

Riley gestured towards the wall of fallen rock. "Still behind there, I would guess," he said. "I don't know how long it's going to hold her—it."

"I need to perform an exorcism, get that thing out of Sam," Catelyn insisted. "Before it gets any stronger."

"You won't be doing anything until you get stronger yourself," Riley answered. "You're in no condition to exorcise anything. Here, have some more tea." He handed her the flask, and she drank a long sip from it.

"I'm fine," she said, pulling herself up—then stopped mid-gesture and laid down again. "Okay, maybe not," she admitted. "My head is swimming. What did that thing do to me?"

"I don't know," answered Riley. "But whatever it was, it can't get to us—yet. You should take advantage of the lull, we don't know how long it'll last."

"Sound advice." Catelyn looked at him. "You happen to have any food?"

Riley nodded, pulled a ration bar out of his backpack, and handed it to her. She looked at it and made a face, but ate it anyway. "Wouldn't want to have to perform the exorcism on an empty stomach. Let's just hope the demon gives me 15 minutes to digest, or I might get the bends." Catelyn looked at him again, and then let the mock-happy face drop, her features softening. "I appreciate this, you know," she said.

"What?"

"Looking after me like this," she said. "Caring for me."

Riley looked at her, in surprise. "Of course," he said. "It goes without saying. What are friends for?"

Catelyn only smiled and lay on the floor, regaining her strength.

* * *

**Los Angeles, California**

Faith emerged from the bathroom dressed in a pink bathrobe. In response to Spike's incredulous eyebrow-raise, she shrugged. "It's the hotel's," she explained.

"You don't have to explain yourself to me," said Spike, raising his arms. "You're an adult. You can wear the color of marshmallow bunny rabbits if that's what you want. Just don't expect me to be intimidated."

Faith shrugged. "I'm off-duty. Only vamp I care about right now is in my hotel room and has a soul."

"You're keeping the ponce in your closet?"

Faith smiled, sat down on the hotel bed, made a show of looking at the alarm clock the hotel had placed on the nightstand. "You know," she said, "if you leave now you can probably get to Harmony's in time for a good shag."

Spike shook his head. "She's starting to complain. How I take her for granted, and how I'm only thinking of Buffy whenever I make love to her. Which is true, of course. How I should feel sorry for the way I used her when we were going steady—"

"You were actually dating her?"

"That was before I got my soul," explained Spike.

"Ah. I see," Faith said, then laughed. "Doesn't appreciate the value of the stress-relief shag, does she?"

"No," agreed Spike. "She's a clinger. Dependent."

Faith shrugged. "Maybe you should find someone who does. Not everyone minds being used, especially by someone as good looking as you. Being beautiful doesn't have to be a curse--believe me, I know."

Spike only shrugged back. "I don't know. Dru and me, we were soulless, amoral creatures. We took what we wanted when we wanted, only somehow we kept up coming back to each other. Until Buffy, of course. And then everything changed. A shag doesn't mean to me what it used to mean."

"That's what I told to myself. I mean, long incarceration, not many options other than Celia the Cellmate. And then I got out, told myself I was turning over a new leaf, going to devote myself to one guy at a time…Robin was driving me crazy by the second week. It seems a leopard can't change its spots."

"At least you know it's spots," Spike muttered to himself.

"Excuse?"

"Nothing," answered Spike. "Just something Harmony said."

"Look," said Faith, "I know you're all reformed and all, but then, so am I. Just because we're not evil anymore doesn't mean we have to get married before we fuck. At least, it better not mean that, or I'm turning evil again."

"We did get the better tunes then, didn't we?"

* * *

**Somewhere in Romania…**

"What is it, Amanda?" Dawn asked.

"We need to get away from here," said Amanda. "Remember? Drusilla is after us."

"We need to find Buffy," said Dawn. "Get her to help us."

"There's no time. We need to get to L.A. Now."

"Right now?"

"If we could."

"I can get us there, if we have to."

"You can?"

Dawn nodded. "A teleportation spell I saw Willow use. Don't tell anyone; they don't let me use any magicks, and teleportation spells are stronger than most. I know I can do it, though."

"You do."

Dawn nodded, a mischievous look on her face. "I might have used it to slip out of the house once or twice."

Amanda smiled. "What a wicked girl. You can do it now?"

Dawn nodded. "I can. _Discede_!"

And there they stood, in a hotel room. Faint, Dawn collapsed on the bed. Amanda sat down next to her.

"That will do," she said.

* * *


	11. It Keeps on Coming

**_It Keeps on Coming  
_**by Alixtii

**

* * *

**

"It shouldn't be long now. Prophesies say one thing, brute strength says another. We'll get it out."

–Caleb, in "Touched"

* * *

**Los Angeles** **California****—December 2002**

Lydia walked into the Hyperion office and came face to face with the vampire with the soul, Angel.

It wasn't as if Lydia had never seen a vampire before. She had even fought ones before, in training and under control circumstances. She had interviewed Angel's own grandchylde, William the Bloody—on whom Lydia had even then been the worldwide expert—flanked by operatives armed with crossbow and cross. (She had gone back alone later, but only after she found out about the chip.) Never before had she been in a room with a vampire where it was only the vampire's sense of morality which prevented him from ripping out her throat

Of course, Angel was unique. He had a soul.

He looked at her, as if he was amused by her discomfort. Probably was; it wasn't as if the vampire had any reason to hold any love towards the Watcher's Council. Lydia remembered the Council refusing to help the poisoned Angel on the principle that they did not aid vampires, even souled ones. Another one of Wyndam-Pryce's brilliant decisions. The Slayer her self had quit the Council in protest. Wyndam-Pryce's own son had been fired as result of the brouhaha.

And, of course, there had been so many other things. The black ops team sent to capture Faith. The Summers girl's Cruciamentum.

"So you have seen the First Evil." He didn't make it a question, so Lydia didn't respond. She merely waited for the vampire to continue.

"The First Evil plays on your doubts, your fears. It manifests as whoever can do the most damage: people you've wronged, people you love. Anyone who is dead."

"It appeared as Quentin Travers."

That got a reaction. Angel looked at her, really looked at her for the first time. He wore an expression as if he couldn't believe what she had just said.

"He was my mentor," she explained.

Angel knew who Quentin Travers was, of course, and like the Council as a whole, it would not have been a name he would remember with any fondness. But he made no mention of Travers.

"It takes on the memories, the personalities of whoever it manifests as," explained Angel. "It tells you whatever it takes to destroy you, to make your self doubt your self precisely when one is needed."

Lydia nodded. "Last month, the headquarters of the Council were bombed—presumably by an agent of the First Evil. Travers died in that explosion, as it did everyone else in the room, except me. There is no possible natural explanation, and the normal detectors for supernatural activity came up dry. Last week, the First appears to me as Travers and tells me that it saved me, so I could—I don't even know what it wants me to do. But I know it can't be good."

"It fits the First's M.O.," Angel agreed. "As you no doubt know, Buffy sent me—Angelus, that is—to a hell dimension in '98. By the end of the summer, I was returned here, my soul intact. To this day, I couldn't tell you how or why it happened. But it did.

"That winter, the First began to appear to me as people I had killed, both long ago and recent. It told me that I was brought back to drain Buffy. To be a monster."

"Then what it tells you, it's not true. It's just lies?"

Angel shook his head. "It doesn't need to lie. It has a much more powerful weapon: the truth. It told me I was going to drink Buffy. And I did."

"But you didn't kill her."

"No." Angel's voice sounded distant, as if his mind were focused on an entirely different subject. "I didn't kill her." He paused, took a deep breath—or pretended to, since vampires didn't breathe—then continued. "The last night the First manifested in front of me, I went to end my life in front of the rising sun. And it began to snow, blotting out the sun just as effectively as the sun is blotted out now."

"Something intervened."

"Something, somebody, I don't know. I'll probably never know. I'll probably never know why I was sent back from the hell dimension. But you know what? I know that without the sun, it's a 24-hour feeding frenzy for vamps in L.A. I know that there are a lot of people in danger, who need to be saved from those vamps. I know that we need to find out how to bring the sun back, or a lot more people will be in danger, more than I can possibly save. And in the end? That's all I need to know."

He walked over to a cabinet, took out an axe. "Now I'm afraid we have an apocalypse to deal with. I'd invite you to help us out, but I'm afraid that might cause a little friction with Wes. And believe me, we have all the friction with Wes right now that we can possibly handle."

Lydia was intrigued by that comment, but felt it was best not to pry. "It's okay," she told the vampire. "I have things I need to take care of in England. But I'll remember what you said."

Angel exited the office, where he was joined by Wesley and a couple of other armed individuals, presumably members of the Angel Investigations team. "It's not what one says," Angel said, wielding the axe, as the group left the hotel, "it's what one does."

* * *

**Los Angeles** **California**

Drusilla look at the prostate form of the girl asleep on the bed. Such a good girl.

Drusilla remembered the Slayer's sister from years back, but she knew quite well the pixies had put those memories into her head. She couldn't be fooled that easily, not even by this pretty ball of energy who pretended to be a girl. Drusilla was reminded of a Christmas wreath.

Hmm. Perhaps Drusilla would go find a wreath. She'd be able to find one in the city, she knew. Somewhere among the giants made of stone and steel, she'd find it, living branches fashioned into a circle with no beginning or end. Yes, that's what she'd do.

Drusilla leaned over the Key's unconscious form, whispered in her ear. "I'll bring you back a Christmas present, Miss Muffet," she said, then kissed the girl once on the cheek.

Then, Drusilla pulled her self up to her full height, and made her way out of the hotel room, knowing a Christmas wreath was waiting for her, somewhere.

Along with her boys, of course.

* * *

**Somewhere in ****Africa**

Riley and Catelyn could both see the stones which made up the wall of fallen temple shift. "That's our cue," said Riley. "You ready?"

Catelyn nodded. She stood on her feet now, and the colour had come back into her face. "Just keep it busy while I perform the exorcism."

Riley sighed. "We know how well that strategy worked the last time."

"You have a better plan?"

Riley had to admit he hadn't, as the arm of Samantha Finn broke through the stones. Soon her bare torso was through as well, and then the entire body. "Be prepared," spoke the demon through her mouth, in a voice which was not hers but its, "to return from whence you came. Your Creator is waiting."

"Well, I guess He'll just have to wait a little longer," said Riley, countering one of the demon's blows with his sword. "Because the guy returning, it's gonna be you."

Behind him, Catelyn began to chant. "_Exorcie te. Omnis spiritus immunde. Adaperiae."_

Yr-a'k-tr continued his attack, catching the blade of Riley's sword and throwing it—and Riley—to the side. "Caitlyn?"

"I'm trying! Give me more time! _Abrenuntias satanae, et omnibus operibus eus! Omnis spiritus immunde. Exorcie te!_"

Riley pulled him self to his feet as quickly as he could, blocking the demon's frenzied attacks as he did so.

"It doesn't seem to be working!"

"He's too strong! He's resisting the exorcism?"

"So what do we do?" he shouted as he tried in vain to keep the demon in his wife's body back.

"We could try to magnify the power of the spell. The only thing is, the stress of ripping the demon out of Sam'sbody with that magnitude of power could kill her."

"Other options?"

"That thing kills us and keeps her body."

Riley nodded. "Then I think we have to take the risk."

"Do you trust me?"

Riley was momentarily taken back by the apparent non sequitor, but knew Caitlyn wouldn't have asked without a reason. He answered "yes" without any more hesitation. Sam's life hung in the balance; he couldn't afford not to trust his only teammate left.

Caitlyn pulled a small red stone out of her pocket. "This is an Yrthas crystal. I'm going to use it to magnify the spell, but for best effect, I'll have to enter into telepathic rapport with you, so we can double the power used to expel the demon. As always, there's risk. So I ask again, do you trust me? In your mind?"

He had made his decision, and he would stick to it. Whatever it took to save Sam, he would do it. Besides, he did trust Caitlyn. "I'm sure, Caitlyn. Let's do this."

"Okay," she answered, and resumed chanting. Suddenly, Riley felt a presence in his mind, silently asking for deeper penetration. Riley—well, he wasn't sure what he was doing, but it felt like he sort of latched on to it with his mind, drew Caitlyn deeper into him self. He could feel her urgent sense of need, that this was what she needed to save Sam, and drew her in even deeper. He could feel her fear as well, as the two minds came together to power the exorcism.

She was inside his skin now, and he was in hers. There was nothing he could hide from her, or her from him; they were open to each other. So many hopes and desires and fears, all held together by mental discipline and a single overpowering desire to save Sam.

_Exorcie te. Omnis spiritus immunde. Adaperiae.

* * *

_

**Los Angeles** **California**

"God, that was good."

"I had forgotten how satisfying sex with a Slayer could be."

"And now I see what B' sees in you guys. Have to admit, still a little freaked out by the whole 'room-temperature' thing, but the stamina—"

"Courtesy of vampire constitution, love. It's the demon inside."

"Well, that makes two of us. I think our demons get along well with each other."

"Well, I did keep Dru satisfied for over a hundred years."

A pause. _Oh shit_, thought Faith. Drusilla. She still had no idea how to deal with _that_ issue—the whole reason she was in L.A. in the first place.

"Something I say, love?"

"It's just that Drusilla, she killed Kendra." How was that for thinking fast, coming up with a good lie? "She's the reason I became a Slayer."

Spike paused, then nodded. "No more talk of Dru, then."

Which was all well and good--accept the crazed vampire was off somewhere, trying to remove Angel's soul, and Faith was in an L.A. motel room with a different souled vampire she had just fucked, and had no idea what to do about any of it.

* * *

**Somewhere in ****Romania**

Buffy fought as the wolves attacked her, jumping against her, ripping their teeth into her flesh and scraping her with her claws. She beat them back as well she could, but already she was too battered and bloody. They were too small, too quick and too agile, too fearless. They just kept on coming for more.

As she knocked one wolf away, she decapitated it with her sword. Shocked, she watched as it exploded into dust. _Vampire_ wolves? What would they think of next?

Just as she was about to change her tactics to cope with this new information, the wolves suddenly all stopped, and ran off. Collectively, as if they had all together received some type of silent information.

Not having time to worry about the vamp-wolves, Buffy raced to where she had last seen Dawn. Neither her sister nor the mad vampire were anywhere to be seen. Buffy looked around franticly, for any sign of them. Against a tree rested a badly wounded Romani woman. "Did you see where they went?"

"Away," answered the woman through her pain. "To . . . rejoin family."

Angel, Buffy realized. "She's gone to L.A." In a frenzy, she grabbed the Romani woman, taking care not to disturb her wounds. "Did she succeed? Does he have his soul?"

"He has his soul," the woman answered, her eyes peering deep into Buffy. "They all have souls."

The woman's eyes peered even deeper, and suddenly Buffy realized she was dead.

* * *

**A/N:** Well, I guess these means I'm back from hiatus. Maybe. We'll see. Merry Christmas! 


End file.
